“Schools Should Not Be For Profit Making” –Wole Soyinka

Nobel Laureate and human rights activist, Professor Wole Soyinka, on Thursday tagged private entities establishing educational institution for business as anti human.

Mr Soyinka said this at Ilara Mokin near Akure,Ondo State, during a facility tour of the Elizade University established by the Chairman of Toyota Nigeria Limited, Chief Michael Ade- Ojo.

He said those establishing educational institutions should not have the mindset of making profit but to assist the country in rebuilding the standard of the already collapsed educational sector.

"You cannot treat education like business. It's not logical and it's an anti-human policy. It is like the health sector which should be accessible to all regardless of one's social status in the society.

"The educational system as you know very well in this country had collapsed a long time ago and I think that private initiative in the sector will help in raising, pulling upward, the standard which our generation enjoyed, and lead to the recovery of such standard as we had in the past.

"The crucial element of education which is standard need to be enhanced with an initiative like this which are genuinely, based on strategic planning because there are some private institution who are out to make money through education," Prof. Soyinka said.

Commenting, the founder and Chairman of Toyota Nigeria Limited, Chief Michael Ade- Ojo affirmed that his utmost aim for establishing the institution was to take education to a higher level and to ensure that Nigerians who continue to send their wards out of the country for education due to the rotten sector are discouraged from doing so henceforth.

He noted that Nigerian students pay as much as $10,000 per session in Ghana, adding that what his institution is charging is far less than the world class facilities in his school.

"Very few universities in the country are equipped with infrastructure these days. My intention is to reverse the race to go overseas for education. It is surprising to know that we have a lot of Nigerians in Ghana now who pay at least a tuition fee of about $10, 000 per session.

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