A legal luminary and founder of Afe Babalola University Ado Ekiti (ABUAD), Chief Afe Babalola, on Thursday said the only solution to continue agitation for self determination by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) remains the urgent restructuring of the country.
He also contended that the nation’s economy, which is still in recession, can only be restored if the federal government yields to the incessant calls for restructuring.
Babalola made these known at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife after delivering a lecture titled “The Difficult March Towards Educational Security in Nigeria: Law, Policy and Governance Imperative.”
According to him, “we are better as one and indivisible Nigeria. The only answer to agitation for secession by pressure group in the East is restructuring. Don’t go to war, don’t secede. We need to embrace restructuring as a panacea to these problems.”
While maintaining that the current economic recession can also be tackled through restructuring, Babalola said allowing each federating unit or region to develop its local economy and maximise its revenue would eradicate dependence of states on monthly allocation from the federal government.
Earlier in his lecture, he said “in Nigeria, we expect the government to provide free university education when developed countries like Canada, United States, and United Kingdom cannot even guarantee free university education. This is a misplaced and wishful priority by agitators of cheap or free education.”
Babalola affirmed that “what we need is not free or cheap university education, but affordable university education. It is the constitutional responsibility of Nigerian government to subsidise education to make it affordable and not too high for citizens.”
“Students, both in private and public universities are provided diverse forms of scholarships, grants and aids so that that can afford the set tuition. This way, the university maintains a positive balance sheet to finance operations, overhead costs, activities, while students are able to afford what could have been an overtly unaffordable and prohibitively high expensive education.”
“Rather than looking to authorities at private or public universities to reduce their tuitions and become cheap, Nigerians must take informed decision at state and federal levels for governments to establish tuition subsidy, grants or scholarship schemes and in the process, tuition bills for children of the poor would have been borne by government, while the rich would pay for full cost of education of their children”, Babalola remarked.
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