Uchechukwu Nnaike
A year after 15-year-old Davina Phillips from Bloombreed School, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, emerged the overall winner of the 2025 Bishop Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition for Secondary Schools in Nigeria, another Rivers student, Clinton Chimenem Agburum, of Deeper Life High School, Port Harcourt, has won the 2026 edition.
Agburum, who will receive a star prize of N1 million, scored 72 per cent in the first round and 85 per cent in the second, for an overall total of 79 per cent.
Alimi-Adeiga Mosorireoluwa from Holyland Senior College, Ipaja, came second with 75 per cent in the first and second rounds, with an average total of 75 per cent.
Oloruntimilehin Elijah Oladipo, from Isolo Comprehensive Senior High School, came third with 70 per cent in the first and second rounds with an average total of 70 per cent.
The Chief Examiner of the Mike Okonkwo National Essay Competition, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, said that, as usual, students from across the country wrote with enthusiasm and sent in their entries, adding that 850 essays met the technical requirement and were submitted to the panel of examiners for review.
“We report that, in general, the entries provided for us a convincing proof of how science and technology are transforming the delivery of education and the ways that students have positioned themselves to benefit from it, while awaiting the fundamental overhaul that the current curriculum requires to cope with a change,” she said.
Ezeigbo stressed the need to assess critical thinking and learning skills by asking students to generate and document ideas on assigned subjects. For instance, she said traditional English composition training requires students to think and reproduce their thinking in words on sheets of paper within a given time.
She added that AI is reshaping that curriculum by doing the thinking for students and delivering better results than teachers’ marking guides.
Ezeigbo disclosed that more than 85 per cent of the essays that were examined in 2026 had identifiable imprints of AI or machine thinking that satisfied the frameworks of traditional assessment.
“It is human in nature to follow easy path and most of the students contacted machine learning to do the thinking for them in a way that cannot be described as plagiarism.
“They are simply demonstrating agility and resourcefulness in the way they deploy the machine learning to ease what they see as difficult methodologies of the traditional curriculum.
“So, we are not just witnesses to remarkable scientific progress in learning taking place. We are also seeing how originality is being blunted by thinking machines,” she stated.
Ezeigbo said the examiners also sought the opinions of the seven who made it to the second round on AI use, but only five turned up.
“In a more controlled environment at TREM boardroom, we asked the students to produce two foolscap pages on the topic, ‘Is AI the future or the end of Education’, the result we got was statutory verification of what we observed in the entries and proof that the current marker of human progress lies in how learning is being outsourced to machine. It is a wake-up call for curriculum redesign, our mindset and systems must ease up to new ways of thinking about learning to remain relevant in the changing world,” she said.
According to her, the winning essay acknowledged the widespread use of AI among students as a learning aid.
Ezeigbo added, “He reported how AI is reshaping medicine, geography, entertainment and even politics in remarkable ways and pointed to how it has made life easier and made work more efficient. He wrote boldly that some may argue that AI makes student lazy and may impact the reading culture (negatively), ‘I am of the (contrary) opinion that smart work beats hard work’ his conclusion about machine technology in learning is very telling: ‘it is not only the future of education, but the future of humanity itself’.”
Ezeigbo said the overall winner, Agburum, leapfrogged from number four out of seven in the first round to first place in the second round.
She said that the finalists “have offered their individual opinion about the electoral reforms in Nigeria, while also informing us that AI is a modern reality that must be integrated with our learning system, pointing out that it “is now left for us to face these truths that have come out of the mouth of babies and sucklings”.
All the winners and their schools will receive their prizes at the 2026 Mike Okonkwo Annual Lecture series on September 3, 2026, at Zenith Bank, Shell Hall, Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos.
The Mike Okonkwo Annual Lecture series has become a veritable platform to discuss issues and cross-fertilise ideas on how to move the nation forward.