Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has charged the Federal Government to urgently wade in and resolve the barring of law graduates of National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) from attending Law School.
Obasanjo, an alumnus of NOUN, said this when the vice chancellor of the institution, Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu, paid him a courtesy call in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital. He said the issue was a serious matter and should be so handled without delay.
Recently, the school suspended admission into its LLB programme after the Council for Legal Education (CLE) claimed the part-time law programmes were not robust enough to equip their graduates with the know-how to ply the trade.
NOUN’s position that its law was not a part-time affair fell on deaf ears. Consequently, the National Universities Commission (NUC) was forced to place a moratorium on the programme pending the resolution of the contentious issues.
Obasanjo said: “When they told me about law people, I said who are the early lawyers? They sat at home and read and they ate their dinner… And then they qualified. We know; we were there with most of them in the 1950s.
“Whereas we have made the university popular, we still have a sort of what I call either ignorance or resistance. I try to explain, and I think we need to do this, people don’t know how the open university works. And we need to make them know it.”
Besides, he called on the Federal Government to increase funding of NOUN for it to meet its objectives, saying: “I think we have to persuade government to give you more.
The point is that at this point in time, money is scarce, but the open university is doing much more than any other university in the world is doing. I am not running down other universities; what I’m saying is that the opportunity that open university offers is much more than the opportunity any of the world universities could offer.”
The point is that at this point in time, money is scarce, but the open university is doing much more than any other university in the world is doing. I am not running down other universities; what I’m saying is that the opportunity that open university offers is much more than the opportunity any of the world universities could offer.”
The former president, who described Adamu’s appointment as “a square peg in a square hole as far as our university is concerned,” thanked the school’s management for naming the newly-established good governance and development research centre after him.
He also accepted NOUN’s invitation to present a lecture on the topic, “Leadership and Challenges of Development in Nigeria: The Way Forward,” as part of the activities to mark his birthday in March.
Adamu, who briefed Obasanjo on his successes since he became the vice chancellor, dof the steps he took in developing the university system as innovative.
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