10 year-old Kamal Adeleke wins Spelling Bee

Kamal (second right) with other winners

For spelling the word ASTRONOMY, 10 year-old Kamal Adeleke of LAFRED Nursery and Primary School, Ebutte-Metta got the opportunity to represent his school at the 2014 Spelling Bee Exploded competition organised by Achyn Media, little did he know that the word that would make him winner of the competition was also ASTRONOMY.

The primary 6 pupil told revealed that his proprietress Mrs. Mrecy Adenekan while choosing who would represent the school in the competition asked him to spell ASTRONOMY and after he spelt it, she pronounced him the school’s representative.

The son of Mr and Mrs Rasheed Adeleke, father, a plumber and a trader walked majestically to his seat whenever he spelt a word correctly never failing to give a thump up to his class mate assuring them that he would win the prize and he did.  

The first amongst three children, Kamal promised to donate his prize if it is in cash to his school’s proposed secondary school building but says if it is a laptop, he would keep it until he can use it well.

Asked how he managed to study the 400 words given to his school for the competition, Kamal said: “I studied it in 16 days. I took 25 words everyday and 25 multiplied by 16 is 400.”

He confessed that he became scared when new words were introduced but was glad that amongst the new words was astronomy.

Speaking during the event, the Creative Manager and Chief Executive Officer Achyne Media, Mr Akintoye Waliu said they decided to start the spelling bee competition when they discovered a there was a vacuum.

“I and my team members saw a vacuum and we decided to fill it. The other competition like this in Lagos is by the Lagos State government and it is for only public schools so we decided to do this for private schools because the government cannot do it alone,” he said.

He said the performance of the children was incredible saying that when they discovered that some of them were spelling words without missing any they decided to introduce new words especially for the last three participants.

Explaining why they decided on the name Spelling Bee Exploded, he said they have tried to hold the competition before but it was a failure because of financial problems. “We went back to repackage and even made it bigger and called it exploded. Another reason why we called it exploded is because it was restricted to some local government before but now it is opened to all schools in Nigeria.”

Asked how they got support, he said they don’t have any supporters presently adding that they asked each school to pay a registration fee of 5, 000 to participate so as to get money to organise the event.

Hinting that the event is all inclusive as no school is left out of the competition, he said they we want virtually all schools to participate no matter how small. “We don’t want any school to be left out.”

In all, he said 145 schools registered but because of the common entrance exams interview going on some couldn’t make it however, added that they have about 90 per cent turnout, which is about 110 schools present.

He noted that the event wasn’t without challenge. “We had challenges in terms of trust; many schools didn’t believe this would happen, they thought it is just a way to defraud them so they turned us down when we went to them. Another things is because we don’t have enough support, we couldn’t reach all the schools, we reached about 500 schools only because of mobility and we have about 10, 000 private schools in Lagos.”

He thanked the Lagos state government for their support. “We got the venue almost for free from the district and we choose the venue because since they are in Lagos, if they wanted to do such a thing it would be better done in a public school environment to honour the state government and carry the government along.”