No fewer than 40 indigent undergraduates have been awarded Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Awards.
In a lecture titled: “The Law, the Lawyer and the Public Spirit: Gani Fawehinmi in Historical Perspective”, delivered at the award ceremony held last week, Professor Ademola Popoola of the Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, decried the continuous falling standard of education in the country.
The .
Popoola who spoke on issues affecting the education sector in Nigeria, at the event, which held at the late Fawehinmi’s Nigerian Law Publication House, Otunba Jobi Fele Way, CBD, Alausa, Ikeja, said anyone who has the interest of Nigeria at heart cannot but share the late Fawehinmi’s passion for education.
The late Fawehinmi, according to him, beleived education to be the bedrock of sustainable national development and the pivot of progress.
He said the problems of Nigeria’s educational system are legion, adding that access to it, funding, governance, quality and relevance are more telling.
“It is indeed, a sad commentary that in 2014, education, in the appropriate metaphor of Professor S.O Awokoya, is still “The Crisis Child of Our Time”.
“The percentages of failure recorded in the past four years ranged from 75.06 per cent in 2010, 44.66 per cent in 2011, 61.19 per cent in 2012 and 35.74 per cent in 2013, up to a whopping 70 per cent in 2014,” he said.
According to the Law Professor, what the falling standard portends for the country includes threat to the hopes and aspirations of the youths, who are the future and bedrock for any effective and sustainable development.
“Regrettably, in most developing and underdeveloped countries of the world, including Nigeria where corruption, abject poverty, unemployment and disease have assumed a frightening dimension, the youth have become endangered species with bleak and uncertain future,” he said.
The don commended the late Fawehinmi for his initiative in addressing some aspects of the crisis of education at the individual level. He blamed the crisis on long years of neglect, mal-administration and policy somersaults.
“The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi had passion for education as he had for Law. In his life time, he meant many things to many people. Even in death, the memory of him and his good deeds is indelibly etched in the hearts of his teeming compatriots, particularly the down-trodden and the oppressed, whose lives he had touched in a lasting and remarkable way,” he said.
Prof Popoola said the Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM) conferred on Chief Gani Fawehinmi long before he became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) was not by accident.
The late Fawehinmi, according to him, was the only recipient of such title, adding that any other claim to the title of SAM is fake and should be ignored.
Dr. Dipo Fashina, who chaired the Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Awards Board, said the number of recipients was reviewed upward from 20 in 2012 to 40 this year because the award was not given last year due to incessant strike of the tertiary institutions across the country.
The number of recipients, he noted, may be increased in the future as the need arises.
Dr. Fashina, a former President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) said the late Fawehinmi was concerned about Nigerian children who were very brilliant, but indigent.
“There was another thing the late Chief Fawehinmi was concerned about, the disparities in the distribution of education in Nigeria. That there must be a reflection of the fact that there are bright students all over Nigeria,” Fashina said
Over 1,000 students have so far been empowered through scholarship since the awards begun in 1973 by the Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Awards Board.
