Founder of Afe Babalola University Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola, has tasked professionals across all fields to rise up to join politics and be committed to the growth and development of the country.
The legal icon noted that politics and governance should not be left alone for the politicians, saying engineers, doctors, lawyers, journalists and others must be ready to contribute their quota in order to save the nation from collapse.
Babalola spoke in Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital, on Thursday, during the closing of a four-day Council for the Regulation of Engineers in Nigeria (COREN ) regional train-the-trainers workshop for implementation of Outcome-Based Education(OBE) in Engineering programmes in Nigerian Universities held at ABUAD.
He advised COREN against maintaining a lukewarm attitude to the recurrent cases of building collapse and bad roads across the country, adding that many lives have got lost as a result of these due to compromise on the parts of some engineers.
While interfacing with COREN executives, Babalola appealed to engineers not to take the back seat in the nation’s politics, adding that their interest in politics would help them in formulating the right policies and cognate academic curriculum for the profession.
Babalola, however, saluted the OBE programme initiated by COREN, saying it would help in boosting the skills of engineering graduates and make them relevant to nation-building.
According to him, “Today, there are many stories about collapsed buildings all over Nigeria, particularly in the cities, killing innocent souls. Why? This is largely because standards have been compromised by pecuniary reasons by some unscrupulous engineers.
“What did your council do when Nigerian railway, Nigerian Airways, the National Shipping Line fizzled out? What did your council do when the road network throughout the country suddenly become death traps?
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“The profession is key to our growth and development as a country and unless you engineers and other professionals do something, the country will collapse. The change will need in society can begin with the engineers and with that , we will have a better society.
“With the multiplicity of problems of insecurity, banditry, kidnapping, herdsmen’s attacks, grinding poverty, robbery, decayed infrastructure, spiral unemployment, unpaid salaries, pensions and other emoluments, badly depreciated Naira and an unbearably heavy external debt burden, Nigeria is on the precipice.
“All of us should be interested in how we are governed, who governs us. We must not keep our cheeks in our tongues.”
Reiterating the need for a new people’s constitution before the 2023 elections, the renowned lawyer said, ” i have gone further to advocate that there should be no election in Nigeria unless a new constitution is put in place to ensure that Nigeria does not recycle failed leaders again.”
The Registrar of COREN, Professor Joseph Odigure, said there was a need to strengthen the accreditation system for engineering in Nigerian universities for the purpose of producing graduates that would meet local and international demands.
Odigure averred that the rapid pace of globalisation and emerging techlonogies globally, make it necessary for engineering faculties to be properly regulated for local and international recognition of certificates obtained from Nigerian higher institutions.
Elaborating more on Outcome-Based Education(OBE), Odigure stated that it is an approach to education that focuses on specific attributes in terms of knowledge, skill and attitudes that must be exhibited by students.
“By implementing OBE, students are expected to be able to do more challenging tasks, rather than memorise what was taught. This implies that tertiary education could provide both professional knowledge /skills and all-around attributes to their graduates through the OBE approach.
“In addition, OBE helps to empower a workforce that can compete in a global economy of the 21st century as it equips learner to transfer academic success to life in a complex, challenging and high-technology future.
“We observed that many of our engineering don’t secure jobs easily, so with OBE, they can get the required skills, knowledge and attitudes to operate independently. We want to see a system whereby lecturers would be able to teach students to get an expected output not just teaching based on the curriculum alone.
“We want to engage the local artisans and craftsmen, they too have skills so that they can partner with the academics for engineering development, they have to join the engineering revolution. Let us finetune the delivery in engineering. Let us have engineering that is more friendly and that can impact skills to face the challenges of the 21st century for global development,” he said.
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