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You cannot detach education from Islam, says Gbajabiamila

By Sulaimon Salau
13 December 2019   |   4:04 am
The Speaker, Federal House of Representative, Femi Gbajabiamila, has said that education and Islam cannot be estranged but the nation must get it right.

• INEC boss links educational problem to poor management
The Speaker, Federal House of Representative, Femi Gbajabiamila, has said that education and Islam cannot be estranged but the nation must get it right.

Gbajabiamila, who spoke at the 80th Anniversary Lecture of the Lagos Crescent Bearers in Lagos said: “We cannot sit down and watch the decline of education in the country. I hereby declared myself a bearer.”

He said that education is not a privilege but a right and there is the need to declare a state of emergency in the education sector.

He also paid tributes to the founding fathers of the Crescent Bearers. such: Mobolaji Odunewu, S.M. Onigbanjo, I.A.S. Adewale. A. Fatayi-Williams, M.R.B. Ottun, M.N. Ola Aboaba, M.O. Ekunsumi, N.A. Kekere-Ekun, R.A. Gbajumo, Ade Thanni, and A.W. Williams.

The primary objective of the CB founding fathers was to promote the acquisition of western education by Muslims for their collective improvement and upwardly social mobility in a colonial society, in which Muslims not only experience marginalization but were also typically held up to ridicule and suffer social opprobrium for their religious beliefs and cultural attachments.

Speaking in the same vein, the Chairman Independence Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, said that the problem in the universities is not funding but lack of good management of resources.

Yakubu, who was the Executive Secretary of Nigeria’s Tertiary Education Fund (TetFund), urged the universities to use the money they are getting from the government to provide facilities that will help to build the university.

He added that the problem in our universities is not that of physical infrastructure but that of providing the needed facilities.

“How many of our universities are connected to the internet?” he asked.
He said: “It is not just a matter of establishing a university. There is the need to expand facilities instead of creating institutions.”

He also said that the system is not producing successors that will take up the mantle from the current generation of professors who are managing the universities.

“The system had to produce successors to the current generation of successors which is not producing. Most students are not going into post graduate programmes that will produce the future professors. University is a place of knowledge. We cannot compete globally when our universities are actually closed,” he said.

He also stressed the need for the universities to review the content of what they teach.

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