African leaders have been charged to always ensure that policies of previous governments are accelerated and implemented rather than jettisoned so as to make the continent develop faster
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Professor Adedayo Olukoshi of the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witswatersrand, South Africa, stated this, on Tuesday, at the second annual Ibadan international Social Science Conference organised by the Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Ibadan.
Olukoshi, who was the keynote speaker at the conference themed “Social Science In A Changing Word: Challenges, Socio- Economic Adaptation and Resilience” , noted that leadership in Africa had for a long time been about crisis management. He said hardly is any leadership that thinks 50 years ahead for a country or for the continent.
According to him, every government comes in with its new agenda, nobody builds on what has happened before. No country transforms in that way
” The Chinese know where they want to be by the end of the 21st century, people are already planning how to populate mars when this place becomes too hot, they will leave us and go there and we will then become tourists.
“Leadership vision is also about thinking long term, it’s about building a broad consensus among the leadership elites that there are certain things to which we can all agree.
“The duty of leadership when it changes is not to start reinventing, but to seek better ways of accelerating the implementation. That is what makes Singapore what it is today”, he said.
Speaking on the need for an education curriculum that will promote innovation that will fastrack the continents growth and development, Olukoshi said the content of the curriculum should be such that would aid the transformation of Africa
“We are passing through a period of multiple crises and transitions, locally, regionally and globally. It is n
ot the world as we used to know and there’s more to come it in terms of the shift.
” It therefore raises the question of the content of curriculum by which we prepare our students for the world of tomorrow.
” It doesn’t make sense to say in the name of standardisation we are going to have a uniformity of curriculum across the Nigerian higher education system. It is unhelpful”.
In his opening address, the Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan, Prof. Kayode Adebowale, described the theme of the conference as not only timely, but critically urgent particularly in an era characterised by unprecedented volatility, complexities, technological destruction, geo- political strives, inequalities, among others
Adebowale urged the scholars to ensure that research carried out are translated into tangible policy recommendations and actionable community interventions
Earlier, in his welcome address, the Dean Faculty of Social Sciences, Prof Benhamin Ehigie, noted that the workshop is a forum to equip students of the faculty with the requisite contemporary skills needed to compete favourably with other academics and become world class students and faculty.
