The Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University, Prof. Ademola Tayo, said it was necessary for the government to increase investment in the education sector in order to drive national development.

The don gave the advice on Thursday when he and a team from the university, visited the corporate headquarters of Punch Nigeria Limited.

He said, “We believe that education is a tool for development and that is why there is need for so much investment to be made in the sector to liberate people from ignorance, because ignorance is a disease which has to be stamped out.

“This is why, by God’s grace, we at Babcock, have been able to move to territories where others don’t want to, particularly in the area of Medicine, and I’m glad to say that come December 2016, the first set of students will be graduating from the Benjamin Carson School of Medicine in the school, which was named after a Seventh Day Adventist and a renowned retired neurosurgeon, Benjamin Carson.

“In fact, he (Carson) is collaborating with us to make sure that we move the School of Medicine to the next level. In there, we have opportunities for students to go abroad for external clinical exposure. Just a couple of days ago, some of them returned from India, where they went for their clinical rotation. Also, four days ago (Sunday), two of our students returned from Mexico where they went to represent the whole of the country in a competition.

“This is the same thing in our Faculty of Law. We came first among 45 faculties of Law at the last Bar Examination. All these are possible because we believe so much in excellence and we want to do our best to contribute our quota to high education standards in Nigeria.”

However, the don highlighted some factors militating against the development of education in the country and the poor ranking of Nigerian universities globally.

He said, “Some of the factors being used to measure a university’s standards in the world include its visibility on the Internet, but we all know that Internet infrastructure in the country is poor.

“Power outage is also a factor. These are some of the issues that universities cannot control except the government. So, in a way, some of the factors affecting the performance of universities in the country have to be addressed by the government.

“But at Babcock, we don’t want to keep dwelling on these problems, so, we are going for independent power projects and very soon, we will commission it. This will help us to have uninterrupted supply of electricity on our campus. The project is 80 per cent completed. With this, we will be able to use the Internet to drive everything that we do in the university.”