Fashola underscores role of education in national development

FOR Nigeria to find her feet and move away from underdevelopment, effort must be geared towards aggressively improving the education sector.This was the submission of the Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, while delivering the first Distinguished Lecture titled: The Role of Higher Education in the Development of Knowledge Economy,' at the Osun State University (UNIOSUN), Oshogbo recently.Fashola argued that development of human capitalshould take precedence over other resources, if the country is to make a headway.He charged tertiary institutions in the country to reorder their priorities, by focusing their curricula on courses that are relevant to the development of the economy.His words: 'I am of the view that in Nigeria, our response should be to build competitive structures for the future, with progarmmes that will ensure that the Nigerian economy develops and retain a high quality base of intellectual capital to be able to compete in the global economy.'He drew inferences from developed economies like the United States, China, Brazil, India and Russia, saying that those countries were able to attain transformation due to the huge investment in the human capital.'My thesis is that, the global economy of the future, of this millennium and the next, is going to be a knowledge-based one and education will be the instrument by which that will happen,' he said.He faulted the present system of funding the nation's tertiary institutions, which places greater responsibility on government, insisting that Nigeria must follow the footsteps of other developed societies, where the private sector plays a significant role in funding education.Fashola noted that the nation should begin to attract and retain significant private funding to develop, continuously improve and maintain quality education offered in universities.Stressing that lack of adequate knowledge and unitary system of administration imposed on the country had hampered her development, he called for a decentralisation to enable each state of the federation fashion out its development portfolio, in accordance with the resources available.Fashola, who recalled the significant achievement recorded by the late sage in the area of education, also sought for an improvement in the legacies left in the sector with more attention to the quality of primary education to enable school children have solid grounding in preparation for tertiary education.According to him, there must be a change in gear, in which the nation would focus attention on producing graduates, who are not only imbued with the skills to read and write, but equally have the potentials to create wealth.
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