Legal luminary and founder of the Afe Babalola University, in Ado-Ekiti, Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), on Thursday, suggested that professionals should occupy 40 per cent of the seats of the National Assembly.
Babalola said having such a quantity of professionals at that level of government would “stop recycling of failed leaders or breeding of transactional leaders”.
“The election of professionals will give us full and equitable representation devoid of elections of legislators who are sponsored by godfathers,” he opined.
He spoke in Ado-Ekiti during the closing of a four-day regional workshop for the implementation of Outcome-Based Education in engineering programmes in Nigerian universities organised by the Council for the Regulation of Engineers in Nigeria.
He said, “I hereby suggest that professionals representing each profession like medicine, engineering, law, accounting, banking and finance, journalism, civil society organisations, etc., should account for 40 per cent of the total number of legislators in the National Assembly.
“It will enable knowledgeable, selfless, patriotic, and no-tribalistic Nigerians to emerge as leaders. It will obliterate the negative accolade of Nigeria running the most expensive democracy in the world.”
Babalola also advocated 20 per cent of the National Assembly seats for women “while the remaining 40 per cent will be contested generally by Nigerians”.
The ABUAD founder appealed to engineers not to take the back seat in the nation’s politics, adding that their interest in politics would help them in formulating the right policies, and cognate academic curriculum for the profession.
He hailed the OBE programme initiated by COREN, saying it would help in boosting the skills of engineering graduates and make them relevant in nation-building.
Babalola said, “Today, there are many stories about collapsed buildings all over Nigeria, particularly in the cities; killing innocent souls – why?! This is largely because standards have been compromised for pecuniary reasons by some unscrupulous engineers”.
COREN Registrar, Prof. Joseph Odigure, said, “OBE helps to empower a workforce that can compete in a global economy of the 21st century, as it equips learners to transfer academic success to life in a complex, challenging, and high-technology future”.