Eminent lawyer and founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola, has won the 2020 edition of the African Life Time Achievers Award.
It is an annual award given to deserving Africans who have made significant contributions in the areas of community development, leadership, entrepreneurship, agriculture and education.
The 2020 African Life Time Achievers Award is in recognition of what the Chairperson of the African Achievers Awards and Former Civil Mayor of the London Borough of Hackney, United Kingdom, Cllr. Susan Fajana-Thomas, described as Babalola’s “contributions to the African Educational and Agricultural sectors.”
Some of eminent and distinguished juristic and non-juristic personalities that have won the Award in the past include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jakaya Kikwete, former president of the Republic of Tanzania, Jewel Taylor, vice president of Liberia, the late Prof. Attah Mills, former president of Ghana, Mr. John Momoh, chairman/founder of Channels Television and an Alumnus of ABUAD, Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation and Kofi Annan Foundation as well as the African Development Bank, AfDB.
Reacting to the Award which is slated for Saturday, December 5, Babalola thanked the organisers for appreciating his modest contributions through his various humanitarian programmes in Education and Agriculture.
He used the occasion of the continental award to pay tribute to the selfless and committed teachers who imparted quality and functional education in him in Emmanuel Primary School, Ado-Ekiti, the only formal/classroom education the legal icon ever had. He pointed out that it was the quality education he had in the beginning that shaped his life to become what he has become today.
“I realise better than most that education is power. I also know that education can change individuals, societies, nations and indeed the whole world. I am therefore using the opportunity of this Award to appeal to parents and well-to-do Nigerians to invest in quality education because without quality education, a country is doomed.”
He added: “If the country has quality education and functional education, it will not be going through the various crises of insecurity, spiral unemployment, kidnapping, robbery, gross underdevelopment and unpaid salaries and other emoluments it is currently experiencing”.
With the advantage of hindsight, the renowned Educationist recalled that it was the quality education he had in his Elementary School (the only classroom education he ever had) that propelled him to success in life.
It was the same quality education that assisted him during his seven-year stint as the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos during which he was able to turn the university around as a result of which NUC rated it the Best University around and he was twice voted by the same NUC as the Best Pro Chancellor in the country. He was later voted the Chairman of all Pro Chancellors in the country.
According to the legal giant, it is his belief in the power of education and the fact that example is better than precepts that led him to establish a non-for profit private university which has now turned to a shining example of how a university should be run. ABUAD has within the first decade of its existence overshot its expectations and navigated its way to the comity of top-rated universities in the country today thereby winning innumerable national and international Awards, Accolades and acknowledgements.
He thanked the organisers of the African Achievers Awards for the beautiful things said about him which he acknowledges as a call to more duty, a catalyst that will propel, inspire and encourage him to want to do more for the African continent.