A United States of America professor of International Peace and Justice, Horace Campbell, has called on leaders to ensure religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence in Nigeria in order to move the country forward.
Campbell, who is also a professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Maxwell School of Citizenship, University of Syracuse, USA, called on the Nigerian government to take the lead in the African Union for establishment an African Union Reparations Commission.
He spoke as a guest lecturer during the weekend at the second public lecture of Faculty of Social Sciences, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) on the topic “African University, Pan African Scholarship and African Liberation: Focus on Linkages between Reparation Justice and the Education System.
He insisted there was a need for Nigerians across the country to avoid discrimination on the account of religion and respect one another’s rights and religion.
He said he was a born Christian but his daughter is a Moslem and they live together. “When it is time for Christmas we celebrate it and when it is time for Sallah we celebrate it.”
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He equally challenged Nigerian universities and indeed universities in Africa, to attempt to proffer solution to problems of the continent.
Campbell, who has been involved in Africa liberation struggles and struggle for peace and justice globally for more than for decades, described trans-Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity and urged African universities to teach it.
He particularly urged Nigeria to take up the lead while focusing on crimes against African while focusing on how to support the return of all African artifacts that were taken away by the colonialists from African.
According to him, African Universities must get back into the business of teaching about how to make Africa free.
He said: “African Universities must get back to business immediately on how to emancipate Africa and how to give self-confidence in the African youths.
“So that they can create a new African economy and also have the liberation of Africa, giving the youth a sense that they have a future in Africa and that they can create a kind of pan African economy that would give job for millions of African youths in the future.
“The next step in liberation for all of humanity is reparation. The focus should also be reparations from crimes, enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid,” he said.
“The Caribbean reparations commission is a commission for all of the governments of the Caribbean. The reparation commission had ten point programmes to say that Europe must apologise for slavery and this deal with the question of reparation.
“We are therefore calling on the government of Nigeria to take the lead for the African Union to establish an African Union Reparations Commission to take up the problems of Africans.
Campbell further called for a change of the university system on how knowledge could be reproduced to unleash new technology thereby investing in the University of the Future.
Meanwhile, the Vice-Chancellor of NOUN, Prof. Abdalla Adamu, said focusing more on Nigerian scholarship would be of a great advantage than the international scholarships where people travel abroad to get knowledge that could be acquired in Nigeria.
“Nigerians must, therefore, begin to have confidence and believe that we can do more without necessarily tying down ourselves to Europe,” he said.
He disclosed that NOUN now has an enrolment of over 515,000 students across the country.