Lapite Emmanuel Olamide, a member of the Ifelaw debate committee and Assistant General Secretary of the Intellectual Property Club shares his experience at Calabar.
A Phone call, an E-mail and a journey to Ife.
That was the genesis. My calabar tourney started before the trip itself, it started 10am every morning a week before the trip, all intending participants (I mean those that wish to represent the school at the tournament) had to be present at the faculty to have a training session with the coach- David. Trust me it was a "no-fun fun something" you’re probably wondering what that nonsense is don’t worry I’ll explain.
First of, its not an uncommon knowledge that no training is ever fun same as a bp training, where you debate over and over for hours straight on varieties of motions, it was exhausting but then it was fun all the same- Peter was always around.
Fast forward to being selected and getting paired with Timah, I was packed for a trip to calabar on Friday, I should tell you about the trip here’s a summary - as early as 8am on Friday morning we were cramped in a bus heading to Akure, yea I saw FUTA for the first time, from Akure we got a bus going to Onitsha and from Onitsha we got another one to calabar. It is not that the journey was uneventful I mean I crossed seven seas ( Ondo, Edo,Delta, Imo, Anambra, Abia ) sorry six to get to calabar but this piece is meant to be brief.
Voooooommmmm we arrived at calabar at 3:00am in the middle of the night, yea you read that well and the tournament was to start the next day, after a very short sleep I woke up to a Laolu urging me to enter the bathroom as fast as I can, we later journeyed to the briefing room where we were welcome and of course "briefed" about the competition the room was rendered a Babel with different accents(students) from different part of the world all talking at the same time.
The tournament had debate rounds day and night, smiles,frowns, handshakes and questions, crazy arguments both inside and outside the debate room extremely funny speeches and the wonderful ones, insatiable debaters who are always battling judges and suspicious food(meat actually). In all it was a wonderful experience I learned, unlearned and relearned(I can hereby state that this cliché say it’s tired) well E go be. We move, sorry we moved. 🚀
