About Jesuit Memorial College Port Harcourt
Jesuit Memorial College (JMC) rose out of the ashes of the tragic Sosoliso plane crash of December 10, 2005 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Among the passengers on that flight were sixty-one students of Loyola Jesuit College (LJC), Abuja, Nigeria. Sixty of them died in the crash: a tragedy of epic proportions. Fifty-four families lost their children; one family lost all three children, and seven lost two children each.
To assuage the pains of the bereaved families and immortalize the Sixty Angels (as we now call them), the then Governor of Rivers State, Chief (Dr) Peter Odili, graciously acquiesced to the request of LJC parents who lived in Port Harcourt. The request was to give seed money and land to the Jesuits to begin a Jesuit secondary school in Port Harcourt so that the lives of other children might blossom out of the ashes of their own children. The idea was to honour the Sixty Angels in the living memorial of other children who would live out the same ideals in view of which the parents of the former sent them to LJC in the first place. This would then be a source of ongoing healing for the bereaved families.
JMC is now on twenty-one hectares of land provided by the Greater Port Harcourt City Development and approved by Governor Odiliβs successor, Honourable Chief Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi. The pioneer class was admitted on October 22, 2013 and graduated on July 21, 2019. The school is open to all children across the world irrespective of religion, ethnicity, nationality, race or gender. Its graduates, having been transformed, should in turn become agents of transformation wherever they may be.
