The Restructuring Nigeria Needs, By Bola Ahmed Tinubu

Nigeria stands in the corridor between greatness and failure, between progress and collapse, between hope and despair. Our fate depends on whether we summon the courage to take the bold steps ahead and move in the direction of progress. We must turn our present challenges into opportunities for the re-engineering of our nation’s economic challenges. The University and our educational system have a role to play in these.

The life of a nation is determined by the education it affords its youth. From its universities and schools, a nation derives its leaders and those who shape its society, for good or for bad.
Our nation faces many challenges, some imposed on us by forces beyond our control, some self-inflicted due to the errant ways of past leadership and governance.
Nigeria stands at the threshold of sober decisions. The ways in which we have grown accustomed to running this nation suddenly no longer suffices. If we are to continue as we have done over the years, that malpractice will deliver us into the vise grip of national failure. That which we used to do and laugh at ourselves for in our errant ways is no longer a joking matter. It is now fatal.
We must reform and do so quickly and with alertness to the severity of the circumstances mounting about us.
I am here today because I believe in the achievements that can be wrought by good education when properly applied. If I thought our cause was lost, I would have absented myself from this noble event; yet, I could not because this event symbolises the hope and potential of our collective purpose and effort.
This convocation represents more than just an academic rite of passage. It represents the dedication of a gathering of reformers, creative thinkers, builders and achievers to a purpose greater than each person’s individual pursuits. You represent a community of ability and learning, the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts. You represent the path way to a better, more prosperous land. That path must be taken for we can’t go back because the falsely comforting ways of the past have now turned to dross before our very eyes.