By Sailor
The President of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Hall Literary and Debating Society (L&D) announced on Thursday, 27th April 2023, the decision to withdraw from the ongoing Jaw War debating competition, ahead of its scheduled semi-final battle against Bello hall on Friday.
The L&D president, Omotayo Ajibola in a broadcast message posted on the society’s group gave reasons for the withdrawal from the competition. According to the message, Tayo was scheduled to speak in the long-desired semifinal round Zik Hall recently qualified for. The message reads;
“I would like to thank everyone for the support given to our speakers from the beginning of the Jaw War tournament. We have come this far, broken the jinx and surpassed expectations. We were so intentional about delivering quality speeches and jaw-dropping performance and they came to the fore.
It is consequent upon this that we again have written super winning speeches for the semi-finals. However, I’m sorry guys, we won’t be showing for the competition. It’s painful because we had awesome speeches and it was certainly ours to win. But one of our speakers, myself specifically, is too indisposed to attend the event.
The broadcast continued as follows “And given the situation on ground which is completely beyond our control, the excos, including myself, believe it is better to maintain the standard associated with our performance so far. Today, we are not capable of maintaining that standard, hence, our decision.
You can still attend Jaw war. I’m sure it would be instructive for aspiring public speakers in terms of knowing what to do and what not to do. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience”.
In a chat with the supposed second speaker, Bodunde Ebenezer, popularly known as ‘Speaking Eben’, he voiced his disappointment on the decision to pull out of the competition, lamenting the fact that they had put in too much time and energy in getting to this stage of the competition. In his words, he said when he saw the message, he was in awe for two reasons; he finish writing his speech yesterday and he has been trying his best to internalize the speech. He stated, “I have done a lot of things. I could not sleep, I woke up as early as 2am to internalize this speech, because I don’t want to disappoint. I picked up this thing because I wanted us to boost our scores. I couldn’t imagine going there to just flop and it is just a three minute speech”.
Eben voicing his frustration about not knowing of the plans to pull out of the competition, stated further
“He (Tayo) had this thing in mind and he didn’t even tell me, the supporting speaker, which is very bad. He didn’t tell me anything, he didn’t carry me along. Another thing is if we knew we were pulling out of the semi-finals why did we go through all those stress for quarter-finals? What we did for quarter-finals was crazy, we had only two days , we wrote a speech edited it waited overnight to edit it, and memorize the speech. We put a lot of sacrifice for the quarter finals and only for you to tell me that after everything we did in the quarter-finals you are backing out”.
The L&D President’s decision to withdraw turns out to be antithetic to his past positions concerning Jaw War where he had consistently relayed to the Zik Press that Zik hall will win Jaw War. The Nnamdi Azikiwe Hall L&D society has had a fruitful outing in the ongoing jaw war competition so far, with their qualification for the semi-finals breaking a long-standing quarterfinal jinx in past editions.
