The Great Auchi Polytes Club is an association of Auchi Polytechnic Old Students. The body held its maiden reunion recently. In this interview with Ogechukwu Nwankwo, its President Prince Egbe Humphrey Omorodion, explains thevalue of coming together for common good and giving back to their alma mater.
What is Great Auchi Polytes Club all about?
Great Auchi Polytes Club is all about a group of old students of Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi, Edo State, with a desire for continued interaction and reunion with contemporaries.
This quest has given rise to old students and alumni association respectively. It is instructive to note that the whole idea of our coming together was muted by the visionary chairman of our Board of Trustees, Mr. Preston Toghanro.
What were the events that birthed the association?
Basically, it is the drive to bond together and continue to relate intimately as in the good old school days during our stay on campus which we nicknamed ‘Golan Heights’ because of its unique topography. This led to some former students of the old Auchi Polytechnic to come together to initiate and nurture to fruition Great Auchi Polytes Forum (GAPF).
What is the population of the association at present and what efforts are you making to attract more?
As I said earlier, GAP Club is an international social organisation of elites from the old Auchi Polytechnic in Edo State.Our membership spans across the globe with branches in North America, Europe, and Africa.
A member of GAP Family is known as a Gapian. We actually took off from ground zero and today, we have over 100 members.
We are confident that as we continue to meet and project our very laudable objectives, more persons will obviously identify with us, not just for our individual good, but also for our collective good and that of our alma mater.
How do you intend to incorporate all members across varying financial backgrounds?
Well, as a group, we are very conscious of the fact that all hands are not equal. Nonetheless, we are a group of responsible people and the reason for our gathering is not for stock taking but how we have fared.
It is rather a genuine reunion and everyone, irrespective of their status in society is welcomed; you only need to have attended the Great Auchi Polythecnic to qualify.
You held a maiden reunion tagged in Lagos. What did you intend to achieve?
It was a three-day reunion tagged: “Barracuda Bonding”in Lagos. The event was the culmination of about four years of interactions on social media across different states of Nigeria and other parts of the world.
We achieved several mileages particularly with respect to reunion. First, people were happy to meet face to face, having left school many years ago. More fundamentally is the commitment by a member who is a top notch in the banking industry to build an amphitheatre for our great institution.
Moreover, the reunion further reinforced the bond of true brotherhood, because the event afforded many to see that the association was not just a media hype, but a reality.
In your address, you spoke on the association’s achievements.
We are an association keen on a better future. We have plans to lift our members from pains and the shackles of deprivation. Such schemes include, but not limited to, GAP Life, which is an insurance scheme that guarantees members families some money in the event of death.
There is also GAP Family Scholarship, which is available to members’ children, especially our late members’ widows and widowers.
The GAP club places much premium on education, given the fact that it is the bedrock to all round development, we therefore decided that none of our members’ children for lack of fund or untimely death of their parents, will be deprived of quality education.
