National Debating Championship For Girls:As the Sisters from Convent Get Trounced by The Old Lady…

A Beacon of Hope for Education in Sierra Leone

In a dramatic end to the semi-finals, the Annie Walsh Memorial School resoundingly beat their old and bitter rivals, the St Joseph Convent. This match, many observers now agree, is one of the most hotly contested since the National Debating Championship for Girls started a little over two weeks ago.

As anticipated, the tempo of the encounter was high right through.

Miss Cecilia Alice Sesay, an SSS4 pupil from Convent served as Prime Minister for the day. In her intensely passionate opening construction, she articulately put forward a three-point justification why ‘Parliament’ should endorse a bill that will unconditionally allow pregnant girls to continue their schooling. To a very considerably extent, she succeeded in convincing everyone present that the fact that education was a fundamental right, and in order to prevent discrimination against pregnant girls, were sufficient reasons to allow pregnant girls to continue to go to school unhindered.

And then…

But that was until ‘Member of the Opposition’, Miss Olufemi Hanciles took to the podium. Femi is not your usual shy, docile, extremely-lady-like girl. At sixteen, Miss Hanciles has built a really solid reputation within the debating world in Sierra Leone as a very unreticent debater whose prowess lies in calling a spade a spade. Most commentators agree that her major strengths are actually in her subtle intimidating command of the queen’s language and her uncanny ability to season her speeches with witty jokes and humorous voice transitions in between her many rhetorical jibes aimed at unsettling her opponents.

For instance, in rebutting a point made by the Prime Minister that allowing pregnant girls in school will reduce stigmatization and enhance acceptance, Olufemi laughed off the idea really loudly before asking the Prime Minister, quite rhetorically, if she was really serious when she made that statement. No doubt, Femi was the darling of the audience in today’s match, even surprisingly out-performing her ‘Leader of the Opposition’ Miss Tracy Jack During.

Whatever attempt by Convent’s Adama Benya and co to undo the damage caused proved hopelessly ineffective. At the end it was an extremely teary moment for the Convent sisters whose hopes of getting to the prestigious British Council Auditorium for the Grand Finale have all but come to a sad sad end.

Mouth-watering Grand Final

The Annie Walsh will have a mountain to climb as they clash with the other finalist, the Beacon High School.

The duo of Sandra Ngongor and Jennifer Thomas from Beacon High School has been absolutely dominating throughout the tournament.

To her credit, Miss Ngongor has won three ‘speaker of the match’ awards and is in pole position to clinch the prestigious Chernoh Bah Award for the tournament’s best debater.

The battle line is drawn and it is only a matter of days before we find out who will win this inaugural edition of the National Debating Championship for Girls.

Written by:Joel Abdulai Kallon

First published on Unique News Newspaper and Chozen Generation Sierra Leone on 7th March, 2018.