A former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, on Thursday lamented the worsening condition of roads in the country, saying it was an impediment to movements of citizens and a restriction to economic activities.
Obasanjo, who said he spent many tortuous hours on the road to get to Ado Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital, on Thursday in view of the deplorable road conditions, said, “The roads are bad. We started asking for the best route to take to get to Ado Ekiti. It was tough before we could get here”.
The former president spoke during the convocation lecture of Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti, with the title, ‘The Place of Education in a crisis-ridden Nigeria’, delivered by lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, as part of activities for the institution’s 10th convocation ceremony.
Obasanjo who explained his lateness to the convocation lecture, said, “Kindly accept my apologies for coming late to this ceremony. I thought if I left Abeokuta at 4.30am that I would get to ABUAD at 10am. But when we got to the middle of the journey, the conditions of our roads were bad”.
Ozekhome, who corroborated the former president’s claim, said it took him about eight hours to get to Ado Ekiti from Abeokuta on Wednesday in view of the deplorable condition of the roads.
The human rights lawyer, while delivering the lecture, described the menaces of surging school abduction, banditry and endless borrowing as evils presently killing Nigeria’s education system and portended bold signs of a “failed state”.
He said that for Nigeria to restore sanity to the education sector, there was need for proactive and aggressive actions in tackling “corruption, poverty, insecurity, commercialisation, mediocrity, illegality, deprivation, cultism, poor funding”, and other ills confronting the education sector.
Ozekhome, who said good and quality education was the best way to secure the country’s future, said, “It is certainly the best guarantee for a secure, peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian and stable Nigeria governed by law and not by men. It is the only guarantee of fairness, equity and social justice”.
ABUAD founder, Afe Babalola, who said education could not be isolated from the problems plaguing the nation, lamented the country’s high debt profile, which he said stood at N41.6trillion as at March 2022 while the domestic debt service rose to N5.24tn as at June 2022.
Babalola said, “The first duty of any sincere and diligent government or any other organisation is to pay its debts and achieve a balance economy and break even. When Obasanjo took over in 1999, the first thing he did was to spend the first two years to go round Paris Club and other creditor countries to beg for debt forgiveness”.
Proffering a way out of the country’s debt, Babalola said, “Today, I make bold to suggest that we should set up a committee to launch a Special Debt Liquidating Fund by all patriotic Nigerians.
“I will suggest that the committee be headed by Obasanjo and consist of Gen. Yakubu Gowon; Bishop Matthew Kukah; presidents of Nigeria Labour Congress, Academic Staff Union of Universities, National Association of Nigerian Students; and members of professional unions like Nigerian Bar Association, Nigerian Medical Association, Nigerian Union of Journalists, Nigerian Society of Engineers etc.
Among others, Babalola suggested that those on the Forbes 2022 list of 21 richest Nigerians should pay a minimum of $500million, all those who paid N100million for presidential nomination forms should pay $50million, while all those contesting elections should pay N500million.
