Imisi Ajayi Becomes a Certified Campus Journalist

The list runs to 162 names. At number 101, under a column headed LPO, sits the entry AFAS, and at the end of the row, one word: PASS. That row belongs to Ajayi Imisioluwa Abigail, and it is the reason this record exists.

What the result sheet shows

The document is headed "UCJUI Examination Pass / Fail List" and was supplied to Planet-B under the title "UCJUI 38th Inductees Result". It states its standard on the first page, above the first name: pass cut-off, 50. Across seven pages it lists 162 candidates by number, by name and by press body, and records a result beside each one. One hundred and forty-two passed. Twenty did not. Imisi is among the 142.

The sheet does not print individual scores, and neither does this record. What it establishes is narrow, and worth stating exactly: she sat the union's examination, met the standard the union set, and was passed by it.

The Union of Campus Journalists, University of Ibadan

UCJUI is the students' press union at the University of Ibadan, the country's first university. The material supplied with this record states that the union has existed since 1987 and that it is student controlled, run by the students who write for it rather than administered on their behalf.

Campus journalism in Nigeria has long worked as a training ground rather than a pastime. Faculty presses, hall presses and union papers are where a reporter first learns to file to a deadline, to spell a source's name correctly, and to put a byline on a sentence and stand behind it. Induction is the point at which a student crosses from writing for one of those local press bodies into the union that inducts them.

What this record does not claim

An archive is only as good as its willingness to say where it stops. The document Planet-B holds does not state Imisi's course, her department, her year of study, the date the examination was sat, or anything she has written. None of that appears on this page, because none of it has been established. The union has not been approached to confirm the list independently. Exactly what has and has not been done is set out below, under Provenance.

Why this is kept

An achievement like this usually lives for about a day. It is announced in a family group chat, congratulated, and scrolled past by the evening. Planet-B exists for the other thing that can happen to it: to be written down once, carefully, with the evidence beside it, and left somewhere it can still be read in fifty years.

This is the first record in the archive for Ajayi Imisioluwa Abigail. It is not meant to be the last.