Massive looting of treasury, major challenge to national transformation-Don

Immediate past vice chancellor of the Covenant University owned by the Living Faith Church in Otta, Ogun State, Prof Charles Ayo has disclosed that the major challenge to national development and transformation are traceable to massive looting and bad leadership.

The don made this known while delivering the 9th convocation lecture of Crawford University, owned by The Apostolic Faith in Igbesa, Ogun State, titled: “Restructuring the Higher Education Delivery for Human Capital Development and National Transformation”.

He said consequently, the nation has been going through the same vicious circle of development without success since independence.

According to the don, corruption in Nigeria constitutes a serious obstacle to effective mobilization and allocation of resources, as it diverts resources away from projects that could contribute to the general well being of the citizenry and sustainable development.

“As a matter of fact, corruption has resulted to reduced quality and quantity of goods and services available to the public as reflected in poor infrastructure, poor quality of education standards, poor health facilities and high cost of living as well as rising social insecurity”, he said.

He said Nigeria needs visionary leadership and good governance characterized by effective participation, consensus-oriented decisions, accountability, transparency, responsiveness, effective and efficient management of resources, among others.

Ayo noted that the World Bank defines good governance as the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development; it entails transparent and accountable management of human, economic and financial resources for the purpose of equitable and sustainable development.

“If the principles of good governance had been imbibed by successive governments, there would have been less agitations from some ethnic nationalities in Nigeria on one hand and on the other hand, the country would have joined the committee of developed nations”, he said.

The convocation lecturer said going by various indices, Nigeria can be classified as economically underdeveloped thus faced with barrage of challenges such as food insecurity, poor power generation, unemployment among others stressing that because the nation is unable to develop technologically, thus operating a monolithic and import dependent economy.

He therefore suggested that nations are built by skills and for the country to confront the current challenges it is facing, emphasis must be placed on education that supports the development of technical and entrepreneurial skills and competence.

Esther Taiwo