Afe Babalola Pushes for a Law Limiting the number of Children/ Family to two in Nigeria

Front-line legal icon and Founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola, CON, SAN, has called on the Federal Government to enact a law regulating the number of children a family should have to two in Nigeria as it is currently the trend in China to curtail the negative impact the country’s ever increasing population is having on the provision of quality education.

Aare Babalola who spoke at the Farewell Reception for the Immediate Past Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Julius Okojie, and the Welcome Reception for his successor, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, in Ado-Ekiti yesterday posited that the proposed legislation has become more imperative now than ever before in order for Nigeria to take its rightful place in the comity of providers of quality and functional education world-wide.

According to him, he played host to Okojie to appreciate him for the support he has consistently given to this university, to welcome the Rasheed for his manifested love for ABUAD, to plead with Okojie to use his experience and words of advice to continue to support Rasheed in order to ensure continuity and to be able to identify problems afflicting education in Nigeria as well as offer constructive advice on how to overcome the university problems in this country.

Relying on his experience as Pro Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos for seven years and as the Founder of ABUAD since 2009, Babalola identified the major problems afflicting the Nigerian educational landscape as funding, attitude of Nigerians to giving, University Autonomy in relation to the power of the University Council and Pro Chancellors, the quality of students to be admitted by the Senate of the Universities in the face of JAMB lowering the cut off mark for admission to 160, the place of good quality teachers and Curriculum development.

Others are the need for more Private Universities which have stable academic calendars because they don’t go on strikes, Illegal Universities, TETFUND, strike actions and population regulation of the number of children by each family as well as the place of Technology.

Babalola who has always maintained that education is too important and expensive business to be left to governments alone to fund in the face of innumerable and competing other needs to be met, decried a situation whereby the 2012 budget of North Carolina State University in the United

States of America is far in excess of the pitiable and unpalatable N392,263,784,684 which Nigeria budgeted for over 150 universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education and the UBEC within the same time frame.

“With this scenario, the proponent and protagonist of quality education postulated that it would be impossible for Nigerian Universities to compete favourably with any of the top universities in the world let alone drive innovation and maintain qualitative levels of delivery without donations, endowments or gifts from sources other than government, adding that the lesson from the Stanford University is that Nigerians, corporate bodies and Rotary must contribute generously to education in accordance with international best practices.

Babalola, who denounced the attitude of Nigerian to giving, lamented that“an average Nigerian does not believe in giving and that is what makes alot of difference in Europe and America where people willfully will their estates in support of university education.

“Today, it remains incontrovertible that the best universities abroad thrive on grants and donations. And so, funding of universities in Nigeria can be improved upon if Nigerians change their attitude about giving. The funding of education cannot and should not be left to government alone”.

He added: “The time to act is now, that we can through donations, gifts and endowments change the face of education in Nigeria. If universities have to rely on grants, endowments and other kinds of gifts, then the Societies in which they exist must imbibe the culture of Philanthropy. This culture of philanthropy is unfortunately insufficiently practiced in Nigeria.

“This failure to imbibe a culture of philanthropy is a threat and challenge to funding of educational institutions. “Government should let Nigerians know that they cannot be bearing children and donate them to government to educate. Besides, government itself should change its attitude towards the funding of education.

“It must make deliberate efforts to comply with UNESCO’s recommendation of devoting 26% of the country’s yearly budget allocation to education. In addition, governments at all levels should stop deceiving the people about offering them free education which no government has been able to do after the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, SAN, who devoted as much as 52% of the resources of the then Western Region to successfully prosecute Free Education in that Region.

“My Dear ES sir, the change we need is not about corruption only.

We need change about giving, about endowment, about institution of Professorial Chairs in our universities. Our case should not be different from what obtains in other parts of the world.

“My plea to you today is that you should use your good offices to impress it on the government to increase the annual budgetary allocation to education while there should be more financial commitment on the part of the generality of the people, particularly the well-to- do in the society”.

He advised the new NUC helmsman to look into the issue of quality of teachers and their training and make it compulsory for university teachers to have the requisite training and be certified as teacher before they are allowed to teach, stressing that mere possession of a Ph. D is certainly not enough.

“You should also address the issue of teachers who parade fake certificates. They should not be allowed to cheat the society by eloping to another university after they have been detected in another”.

On TETFUND, he said the time has come for NUC as the Regulatory Body for University Education in Nigeria to make it abundantly and unambiguously clear that Private Universities are non-profit entities limited by guarantee and clearly distinct from Limited Liability Companies where shareholders share money at the end of every business year and therefore should be made to benefit from TETFUND.

“It is hereby suggested and I do recommend that any Private University which operates on its permanent site with a minimum of 20 of its academic programmes accredited by the NUC and has also commenced its Postgraduate studies should have an unfettered access to TETFUND facilities”. He concluded.