Disclaimer: Radio Workshop is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. The official record for Radio Workshop’s podcast stories is the audio.

Abiodun: Hello…

Lesedi: Meet Abiodun Oyeniran. He is all about people.

[MUSIC]

Abiodun: Well, I’m a very sociable person, trust me, people like me and I, and I always give them a reason to continue doing so.

Lesedi: He’s about to graduate with a degree in sociology from the University of Lagos. He’s 28, much older than his classmates, but that doesn’t bother him at all. Abiodun has always been able to connect with, well, just about anyone.

Abiodun: I could sing.

Gotta fix my answering machine. Now that i’m alone…

I could rap, I could write poetry. I could, yeah. People want to write, um, birthday messages, greetings to their friend. They come to me. I write it for them, and so all those things, yeah, they were in my favor.

[STICK TAPPING]

Lesedi: That tapping, you hear, that’s his walking stick. It helps him move around campus. Abiodun started losing his sight when he was three years old. By the time he turned 21, he was completely blind. He remembers that moment when the world went dark like it was yesterday.

[MUSIC]

Abiodun: I wanted to go and fetch water that day, just normally as I used to.

So I got to where I would normally just climb a plank and then go on the road before I get to the well. Yeah, and then I noticed that I couldn’t see the plank like this. I had to use my leg to feel that yes, it was actually there because it was there. Yeah. But I couldn’t see it.

Lesedi: After this incident, Abiodun accepted his fate, but it was hard for his parents. They were religious, so they turned to church and then mosque for prayers and answers, but nothing could be done. They also took him to many hospitals, but still nothing.

Abiodun: It wasn’t a, a heavy blow like, oh God. This has happened. What will I do with my life? Nah. No, it wasn’t like that. I think I just took it on the chest and like, yeah. What’s next?

Lesedi: Well, university was next, but Abiodun faced what Nigerians call wetin big pass you. It’s pidgin for when a challenge is bigger than you.

He couldn’t take the entrance exams because they were handwritten, so it took him years to get admitted. Looking back, Abiodun sees that many of the educational institutions he went to were not built to include blind people, so he made it his mission to change that.

[MUSIC]

Abiodun: In, in 10 years time, it should be very, very, very much more easier.

Lesedi: Hi, I’m Lesedi Mogoatlhe, and this is Radio Workshop. Abiodun Oyeniran became a disability activist by accident. He just wanted to pass his exams and be treated like any other student. When he started university in 2019, he had high expectations. Nigeria had just passed a landmark disability Act where universities were required to improve their support for blind students.

So on his very first day…

Abiodun: My first course was to go ask people, okay, so how do we do this? How do we do classes? How do we do tests? How do we do exams? You know, how do I go? How do I access this facility?

Lesedi: He was shocked by what he found. Visually impaired students were almost failing courses because some exam scripts went missing and couldn’t be scored.

Abiodun: People would have to take their laptops there, write and then print.

Lesedi: While all the other students wrote directly into an exam booklet, the visually impaired students typed their answers on the computer, printed, and then somehow their papers would get lost in the shuffle.

Abiodun: And I’m like, okay, how can we make this even much more easier? Because I thought that what was missing was the human factor.

Lesedi: The human factor is simply someone being there to help blind students sit their exams. They read the questions to the students, write down the answers the students give, and then make sure their work is handed in and accounted for. So Abiodun started a volunteer group called The Children of Selflessness in 2019 to do just that. It now has about 400 helpers.

Esohe: is it this tiny….

Abiodun: oh, right. Yeah. This is the brick…

Lesedi: When Abiodun isn’t fighting for the rights of the blind at the University of Lagos. He’s at a school called the Federal Nigeria Society for the Blind. He started there as a student in 2018. Now he teaches there part-time, information and communication technology.

Esohe: All right. {inaudible}

Lesedi: Abiodun weaves quickly and confidently around campus as he shows our reporter Esohe Iyare around.

Abiodun: If you are walking with someone else, it might not have been this easy. Um, I, because people always accuse me of making it look too easy. It’s not as easy like this for everybody. Aha. It’s because me, you know, um, well, my, my mobility is, my mobility is good.

And also that, you know, I’ve done this for many years, so I’m kind of used to, you know, walking independently.

Lesedi: Abiodun says going to the Federal Nigeria Society for the Blind changed his life. It’s where he learned to read Braille, use computers, and walk with a cane.

Abiodun: It was as though that side of me that was brilliant and always hungry for knowledge, out of its dormancy, just rose up again like I was an exemplary student.

Trust me, I learned Braille in just three months. I started teaching the other students in six months.

Lesedi: Before studying there, Abiodun was stuck for almost seven years, doing odd jobs here and there, but no real way forward. He didn’t know a school for the blind even existed until an acquaintance mentioned it.

Suddenly, there was a path. He wrote his final exams, learned the bridging skills he’d been missing, and finally he could pursue what he’d always wanted. Studying sociology at the University of Lagos or Unilag for short.

Abiodun: Sociology actually spoke to me from my aspect as a person with disability also. ’cause sociology explains all types of social actions.

So if somebody looks at me and says, it’s the disability first, that’s what they can see. That’s their own interpretation. I am the one that it is on to now show them that, no, this isn’t it, this isn’t what you should see. This rather is what is more important.

Lesedi: What matters to Abiodun is inclusive education, where every student, regardless of ability, can access the same facilities and learn together.

Unilag, he told Esohe, isn’t there yet.

[MUSIC]

Esohe: On a scale of 1 to 10, can you rate how inclusive Unilag is?

Abiodun: I would say 5. So although it is accessible, it is just not accessible enough to be scored a 10. They can do much more better, much, much, much more better.

Lesedi: Abiodun says blind students at Unilag struggle to move around campus. Sometimes they have to climb hundreds of stairs just to get to class. Many of the study materials handed out aren’t shared as digital copies and transcribing notes to braille takes time. The visually impaired resource center only has one braille machine, and all of that felt huge to Abiodun, but in the exam hall is where he knew he could make a change.

Abiodun: So there are no cases of missing scripts, so because the lecturer did not print your copy oh because the lecturer thought your script was something else and tossed it, you know, on the desk and forgot about it because it’s not the answer script. So that human factor, that introduction of a human assistant during test and examination, just eliminated all those problems.

[MUSIC]

Lesedi: Children of Selflessness volunteers assist about 40 examinations a week. Most of them are students at Unilag. Some are community members who signed up on social media. Not all the faculties allow for volunteers, and there are strict regulations that ensure that no one is assisted by someone they know, like a student in the same department.

And for five years they all worked quietly showing up for blind students, but then came the tweet that changed everything. A volunteer from Children of Selflessness sent out a call for new helpers on Twitter, but the part that got them into trouble said this. “At Unilag Nigeria is not inclusive for visually impaired students. Sometimes I take students to the exam hall and the lecturers are not aware they have blind students writing exams. Sometimes the exams are on the fifth floor of the faculties. There’s no data on persons with visual impairment in the school. Some don’t have laptops or adequate technology to read and write exams.”

It ends by saying. “You can do way better, to be honest.” So, it quickly blew up, like within days it had over a hundred thousand views. Two weeks later, the university announced a new inclusion policy set to go into effect just one week before exams.

Abiodun: . I feel like if an inclusion policy would be established, it should be discussed, reviewed and passed through for even a sample tests and then should it be implemented. But this policy was just implemented straightforward, like we didn’t know about it. The visual impaired persons that were affected by it. We didn’t know about it at all. It was just take it and do this.

Lesedi: The students didn’t get the chance to read the policy. It wasn’t published anywhere, so they didn’t have anything concrete to question. Parts of the policy trickled down to them through word of mouth. For example, the policy didn’t just regulate groups like children of selflessness. It banned them. No more volunteers. The school alleged the group encourages malpractice.

Abiodun: Oh God, I was, I was turned inside out. I was totally down. I know I was keeping a brave face on it on the group, ’cause I had to start assuring people that, let’s keep to it, like we’ll come back better.

[MUSIC]

Lesedi: Another thing, blind students were required to take exams at a computer lab in the distance learning centre, but Abiodun says it was all a mess. We contacted the University of Lagos to verify what happened. We spoke to Dr. Elizabeth Aremu from Unilag’s Special Education Department. She confirmed that there weren’t enough computers, so students had to wait in long queues.

Some students waited until 9:00 PM to write their exams, but she also says, the inclusion policy had nothing to do with the tweet. She claims that the university discovered many students were cheating. So this policy is a way to reduce examination malpractice, and it makes the examination more inclusive. But Abiodun is not convinced.

Abiodun: Inclusion is not when you create a separate test platform. No. It is your ability to blend what is existing, to fit into my disability, to make what is normal, accessible to me. It doesn’t solve any problem. In fact, it even causes more. To me it’s, it’s a social isolation.

Lesedi: Dr. Aremu says The new policy allows for pairing blind students with assistance to help type their exams, which is what the children of Selflessness volunteers did. So why shut down the group?

Abiodun: Well then see, you can’t win against the house. The house always wins.

Lesedi: The house always wins. [MUSIC] Abiodun was at a loss, but maybe just maybe after all is said and done, it’s a bitter victory. The university is actually talking about the needs of blind students, and Abiodun says there’s still a lot of work to be done. The question is…

Abiodun: Should the children of selflessness. Still exist? Absolutely. Why not? Because problems no dey finish. Trust me, the moment you solve one, another one comes.

Lesedi: Abiodun wants to raise funds to start a program that trains blind students to use computers.

He says that will make them more independent. Soon, he’ll be leaving Unilag with a degree in hand and a legacy that the school hasn’t really recognized. It’s not the 10 out of 10 victory he wanted, but for the blind students on campus. The road is just a little bit smoother.

Abiodun: We came, we saw, we conquer.

Esohe: Yes oo.

Abiodun: We don try.

Esohe: We don try oo.

Lesedi: But before the last semester rolls around with new problems to solve, Abiodun is taking a breather. Learning French and making time for his girlfriend, who’s on the phone with him right now…

[MUSIC]

Abiodun: How far fine girl. What? You are sleeping ni? Oh, you are cooking? What are you cooking? Jollof rice. Really? Ah, thank God. I’m in school. Later on you come outside. Let me show you off now abi. You and your fine hair, except if the hair no fine o for real. Ah, lucky me…

Lesedi: This story was produced and reported by Esohe Iyare and Fayfay Odudu. This episode was edited by me, Lesedi Mogoatlhe and Naomi Grewan, with assistance from Bethel Habte. Special thanks to Abiodun, Dr. Elizabeth Aremu, the Federal Nigeria Society for the Blind, and the National Association of Visually Impaired Students At University of Lagos for all their help. Original music by Qhamani Sambu at Edible Audio in Cape Town. Sound engineering by Fayfay Odudu, Jo Jackson and Mike Rahfaldt. Jo Jackson is our managing producer. Mike Rahfaldt is our executive producer. Vuyo Lutseke is our executive director. This episode and the work of radio Workshop would not be possible without support from Foundation Chanel. Ford Foundation and Luminate. We can only tell these important stories because of your support, you can make a donation at radioworkshop.org.