Akeredolu charges educated elite on solution to societal challenges

Akeredolu who stated this while delivering the 2018 National Public Service Lecture of the University of Ibadan Alumni Association in Ibadan, called on the educated class to avail the society of the benefits accruable from the knowledge they have acquired.

Speaking during the lecture titled: “Multi-Party Democracy and the Politics of Disempowerment in Nigeria” Akeredolu said the obvious lack of capacity, evident in infrastructural deficits, and the near-total dependence on foreign experts to fix them, cast doubt on the utilitarian value of the nation’s education system.

He said: “The socio-economic arrangement of the society must reflect the level of the cognition of the challenges faced by a people.

“The best way possible to regulate conduct, promote amity, encourage production of goods and services, primarily to satisfy societal needs, is to allow lessons drawn from both formal and informal training of the people in the society.”

According to him, the gap between feigned sophistication by the elite and the embarrassingly squalid circumstances under which majority of the people live cast a dark pall on the claims to knowledge, however, minute.

Akeredolu, however, emphasised the role of the people in the equitable management of their own affairs.

He challenged them to avail themselves the capacity and ability to assess and change the leadership of the society at a given period if dissatisfied with the performance of their elected representatives.

The governor added that the platforms of engagement should emanate from reasoned preferences.

He said, “The control and ownership of these political platforms must reside with the mass of the people.”

He said many people wondered that despite claims to sophistication and advancement, poverty continued to spread relentlessly.

According to him, the right of the people to choose their representatives does not find expression in their better living condition.

Akeredolu said: “Their participation has no bearing on the quality of roads, hospitals, schools, industries present in a society, among others.

“The increasing lack of capacity by the citizenry to fix basic infrastructure underscores the irrelevance and ineffectual impact of the adopted system.

“The people are simply invited to validate the decisions made by those who control the commanding height of the economy.

“This periodic allowance of the right to choose, a specious mark of recognition, dubiously and condescendingly extended to the masses of the people, is, regrettably, mistaken for the power which resides with the people to exercise their right of choice.”