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From Priscilla Ediare, Ado-Ekiti
A retired senior lecturer at the Ekiti State University (EKSU), Ado-Ekiti, Prof. Edward Ogunleye, has advised the Federal Government to rigorously implement education policies formulated to achieve intended purposes.
Ogunleye, who retired as a senior don in EKSU’s Department of Economics, Faculty of The Social Sciences, made the suggestion while responding to questions from newsmen on the reforms introduced by the Federal Government to overhaul the nation’s education system, after the celebration of his retirement from service and 70th birthday organised by the department in Ado-Ekiti. He also identified corruption as one of the challenges hindering effective implementation of policies in the country.
Commenting on the federal government’s reforms to revamp the education system, Ogunleye said,” Well, few weeks before my retirement I had my inaugural lecture titled,” Motion without Movement” Though, that applied to the case of industrial policies, I think the same goes with education policies in Nigeria. We always come up with policies hoping that such would bring out some positive results, but at the end of the day you will find out that things do not actually work.
“We introduce a policy now and hope it will solve all problems and by the time we start implementing it, we discover that it is not working and they start revising it again. So, what I think we need to do is to be consistent with whatever we are doing and make sure that we pursue it rigorously to ensure the policy works. It is not a matter of just discarding a particular education policy at any point in time.
Before any education policy can be formulated and implemented some people would have sat down to think and ruminate on the policy or policies, they must have thought it out well before coming out with the policies. So, if at the end of the day we say it is not working, it is not that the policy is not working but we are not making it to work.”
The scholar identified corruption as one of the challenges affecting successful implementation of policies in the country, “some individuals always want to exploit certain situations to their advantage and the moment they do that we find out that the policy does not work.
“So, until we are able to fight corruption to a standstill and ensure that we minimise it in our system, because I don’t think we can actually eradicate it, but we can minimise it to a level where we can say that corruption is not a big problem in the system. It is only then that we can have things working well for our system.”
Giving an account of his sojourn in ESKU, Ogunleye who hails from Ayedun-Ekiti, Ikole Local Government Area of Ekiti State, started working with the institution in 1983 as an Assistant Lecturer, he worked for 42 years maintaining a record free from faults and negative incidents.
” Forty two years is a very long period so it might not be easy to say everything that I passed through but of course, one will not expect that if someone has spent 42 years in a place that everything would go smoothly, of course not. There were times when things were tough and some sorts of persecutions. But in all, I was able to retire from the system without any bad record, without being accused of sexual harassment or of extortion as we hear today, is the grace of God. So, I thank God that it happened that way.
“There were occasions when I had wanted to leave the service to look for a job elsewhere. I am a Christian and God is in control of my destiny. I attended interviews in some places. I remember on one of the occasions, they needed three people and I came fourth, so I was not picked. The same institution advertised again they needed one person I came second, so after that time, I never bothered myself to look for a job elsewhere.
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“And today, I am retiring as a professor. I didn’t have the opportunity of becoming a Vice-Chancellor or Deputy Vice-Chancellor but I occupied some key positions, for instance, being the Dean of my faculty. I was the Provost of the College of Postgraduate Studies. These are achievements to which I am grateful to God. And, the most important thing is that I have been able to impact lives positively. if some people travelled all the way from Europe to attend this event and someone had wanted to come from Australia , it is quite evident that God has used me to impact on some people.
On his retirement plans, Ogunleye revealed that he is still very active and full of agility in his new status as a septuagenarian and a retiree, thus, he can still contribute to academic development in any capacity.
“I am retiring but not tired. I still have some things to do. I am looking forward to joining some organisations where I can still render my services. There are still some other areas in the system where I can be productive.”
The Vice-Chancellor of EKSU, Prof. Joseph Ayodele, extolled the virtues of Ogunleye at the event and noted that the retired lecturer kept a clean record throughout his over four decades in the university.
“Prof. Edward Oladipo Ogunleye is not my colleague but my academic mentor. He taught me in my undergraduate days about four decades ago and he is a disciplined lecturer, an icon, very quiet and soft spoken but powerful academically. He has mentored a lot of us and has contributed his quota to the development of this university.
“All the three key areas of university education – teaching, research and community service, he excelled well in these areas. He has spent 42 years in this university as a lecturer and for those years, the university didn’t have any cause to query him. His file is very clean and nobody complained about him.
“If he were one of those people collecting illegal fees I won’t be here today as a vice-chancellor because I will not want to legalise illegality. If he had actually demanded from me as his undergraduate student that I should give him money for marks, I will not be here. I will just conclude that he has collected his dues. I never heard he sold marks. I never heard that he was involved in sexual abuse. I never heard he was involved in any case of indiscipline, so that is why all of us are here to celebrate him as a leader of the university.
“He has done well for us as individuals and as a university and personally as one of his students, he has mentored us well. I am happy he was able to deliver his inaugural lecture about two weeks ago before retiring. It was a wonderful feat and I appreciate God for his life. As he is retiring, I pray he will not be tired of working for humanity.”
The Department of Economics surprised the gathering by presenting Ogunleye with a brand new car in appreciation of his meaningful contributions to academic development and meritorious service to the university.
The colourful event was attended by family members, colleagues, VCs, friends, students from EKSU and other universities as well as alumni of the university.
