On Thursday February 6, I paid an unscheduled visit to Afe Babalola University in Ado-Ekiti. My primary mission was to visit the founder, Chief Afe Babalola, somebody that I have tremendous respect for because of his exemplary life of determination and success. He is a man who built himself up by his boot strap. His formal education did not go beyond primary schooling at the Emmanuel School, Ado-Ekiti. Even though he passed the examination to the world famous Christ School Ado-Ekiti, he could not take up the opportunity because his parents were too poor to afford his fees. He was determined not to spend the rest of his life in the drudgery of farm life which was the only option open to him. He therefore embarked on self tutelage and correspondence courses through which he passed not only the ordinary level but also the Advance Level of the London University General Certificate of Examination. He then sat for the B.Sc Honours Economics of London at home and the LLB Honours of London before travelling abroad for the required numbers of dinners at the Inns of Court before being called into the English Bar. He returned to the country in the early sixties and registered as a pupil lawyer under the distinguished Olu Ayoola, one of the most brilliant lawyers in Nigeria in the early 1960s. Ayoola eventually ended his career as a high court judge after his illustrious life as a practicing attorney. My nephew incidentally is married to one of Ayoola’s daughters. Chief Afe Babalola then set up his own practice in a modest way but his hard work and determination made his success predictable. I first heard of Babalola sometimes in 1966 when he defended my oldest brother Chief Oduola Osuntokun after being charged to court along with the entire Chief S.L. Akintola’s cabinet after the coup d’etat of 1966. He more than justified the confidence my family had in him when he successfully defended my brother. Since then I have always been impressed by his phenomenal success.
He has gained all kinds of laurels in his legal profession including the Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and several awards and prizes in England, Canada and USA. His chamber in Ibadan is reputed to have produced more Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) than any other chamber in the country. He has been honoured both in Ekiti and outside Ekiti and his latest honour as Are Amofin of Yorubaland was conferred on him by the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III.
Chief Afe Babalola first got involved in higher education when he was made Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos a position which he held for almost eight years during which time he was adjudged to be the best Pro-Chancellor in Nigeria. He donated an auditorium as a parting gift to the University of Lagos. His stint at the university brought him into the awareness of the sorry state of higher education in Nigeria and he was determined to do something about it.
These preambular statements are meant to introduce the founder of Afe Babalola University. Babalola had a vision of excellence in higher education and he is now running with this vision in his own university in Ado-Ekiti. The university runs a collegiate system namely of the College of Engineering, College of Sciences, College of Social and Management Sciences, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, College of Law, and College of Pre-degree and Degree foundation programmes, totalling six colleges in all. The only thing that is missing in the University and apparently deliberately so is the College of Humanities because the emphasis of the university is physical and economic development without provision for humanistic and literary studies. Chief Babalola is obviously following directives of government which erroneously make no room for humanistic and philosophical groundings without which there can be no development. Development is not synonymous with physical building and infrastructure, it involves the fine arts of human behaviour without which there is no civilisation and this can only be gotten from liberal arts studies. This is an argument that I probably should not go into and this is not the place for such a debate. What is important for me to say is that he has built perhaps the most excellent private university in Nigeria. Course offerings go beyond the traditional disciplines found in many universities in Nigeria. I believe that the programmes of ABUAD are heavily influenced by American university tradition. For example, in the Department of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, students can graduate with degrees of Bachelor of Science in Biometrics, as well as Bachelor of Science in Medical Physics apart from the traditional areas of Computer Science and Information Technology, and other areas like Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics with Electronics. His College of Medicine and Health Sciences offers degree courses in Anatomy, Physiology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sports and Health Science, Nursing, Medical Laboratory Technology as well as Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery. This college must be one of the most comprehensive colleges in the country. If ABUAD can find staff to teach all these courses, the university would be one of the best in the world. There is also a Bachelors degree in Tourism and Events Management in his College of Social and Management Sciences which obviously is tailored to meet specific needs in Nigeria today. In his College of Sciences, I noticed that he has special degrees in human biology as well as another degree in zoology and I am happy to note that unlike most private universities where zoology and botany are no longer offered these degrees are offered at ABUAD. For a country in the tropics and whose economy is partially based on tree crops, knowledge of botany ought to be a prerequisite for development.
ABUAD’s 4,000 students are housed in exquisite hostels and fed in excellent refectories and are taught in well endowed laboratories, libraries and engineering workshops. The university is building a massive talents centre on three floors to provide facilities for all kinds of games including basketball, badminton, swimming, squash and dancing floors for students. The university is also building a massive hotel/guest house at the gate of the university which the founder believes will be the best hotel in Ado-Ekiti when completed. The institution is founded on the basis of NOT FOR PROFIT because whatever accrues to it is ploughed back into development and upgrade of facilities. To support this massive development, Chief Babalola has established a university farm that specializes in aquaculture that at its maximum level of development will not only be able to feed the students with fish but the entire city of Ado-Ekiti and its environs with fresh fish as well as smoked fish. That’s not all. The farm is also developing mass production of guinea fowls and quail birds, there is also a piggery but there is no poultry, obviously because Chief Babalola does not want to join the Nigerian crowd in the poultry business. There is a massive mango farm with close to 300,000 mango trees already planted. There is also a moringa farm and a laboratory attached to it producing moringa capsules, tea bags, cream etcetera.
All these ventures would eventually serve as centres for entrepreneurial studies for the students so that they will not only be theoreticians but practitioners in the various fields of their academic endeavours. These ventures are also designed to sustain the university in future. Hundreds of young people are also gainfully employed in all these ventures.
I did not ask for how much it will cost to educate a child there but obviously as they say in Yoruba land that whatever is good must have a price. A child could have a first class education here in Nigeria in this university and perhaps at a fifth of the price to send the child abroad with all the psychological problems involved. ABUAD reminds me of what the University of Ibadan used to be like when I entered it in 1963. It was like a piece of western architecture in the tropics of Africa. This is what ABUAD is like today. ABUAD is service at its best and I pray that many Nigerians of means like Chief Afe Babalola would follow his example instead of spiriting our money abroad for the development of other lands.