A 27-year-old Nigerian man named Amos Ishaku who survived a terrorist attack has bagged a Chemical Engineering degree and won a sum of five million naira as the overall best graduating student of Edo State University.
Amos Ishaku is an Internally displaced person who has been living in the Home of the Needy in Benin for nine years, He said in an interview that he was in his penultimate year in secondary school when the terrorist group came to attack his school.
He said that he had to escape by going through the fence and hiding in a cave in the mountains where he was until he found his way and eventually ended up in the Home of the Needy, through his primary school teacher years after he had migrated from one place to another in search of survival.
”To escape, we had to jump over the fence and run into the bush where we slept. The attack led to the closure of the school indefinitely. We lived in caves for months thinking that the insurgency would die down but it did not,” he said.
Amos stated that he was in the Home of the Needy, the pastor in charge encouraged him to go back to school as he had already given up on school and was just concerned with how to survive.
”It was Pastor Solomon Folorunsho and his team who encouraged me to go back to school. I told them I was not going back to school again but they told me that I could still make it. He told me I could become what I wanted and that I just had to put my heart into it,” he said.
He said he went back to school studying under the three and preparing to take university entrance exams. Amos said he wrote the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination seven times before he was able to pass.