A young university graduate who scored a first-class in mathematics has resorted to what has been described as petty farming to make ends meet.
Reports say Emmanuel Nworie from Nigeria graduated with a CGPA of 4.92/5.00 from the University of Nigerian, Nsukka (UNN) but has not found the befitting white-collar job with his exceptional result as he would have loved to.
Farming is one of the noble jobs most graduates are currently taking up after school to avoid chasing after nonexistent employment opportunities, so the young man engaging in farming despite his good certificate is not news in itself.
What has got some people talking, however, is the fact that Emmanuel Nworie is not doing mechanized farming but a petty manual one ostensibly because he cannot afford what it takes to do mechanized farming.
Where his story gets even more interesting is the fact that the 27-year-old brilliant graduate lost his dad to diabetes and hypertension when he was still in secondary student, according to reports.
Life then became difficult for the young man but he decided to face it squarely by taking up a mathematics teaching job at the secondary school he had attended.
During his teaching times was adjudged the Best Mathematics Olympiad teacher in Ebonyi state.
However, notwithstanding the award, his salary was just a meagre $33.33 (N12,705.40) per month which is about N185,000 annual earning.
Determined as he was, Emmanuel Nworie was still able to save part of the woeful salary to further his education at a polytechnic before proceeding to the university having done other jobs to raise some funds.
Despite all the hardship he had to endure in a bid to climb higher, the young man reportedly won a gold medal in a mathematics contest in 2018 at UNN.
After the university education, the organization with which he did his one-year National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) retained him as a teacher with a N35,000 salary, and he was making do with it until schools were shut down following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.