Vice- Chancellor, Lagos State University, Prof. Lanre Fagboun, has called on the Federal Government to strengthen the judiciary in order to effectively fight corruption in the country.
He said this at LASU’s 58th inaugural lecture, delivered by a professor of Islamic Eschatology in the Department of Religious and Peace Studies, Faculty of Arts, Lagos State University, Ishaq Akintola.
Themed: “Oh God! What Have We Done?” Akintola, in his lecture warned Nigerians to desist from defending corrupt public officers on the basis of religion, ethnicity or political affiliation.
Akintola urged the Federal Government to recruit at least 100,000 more policemen before the end of 2019 in order to meet global best practices. He also called on the FG to jail corrupt public officials and ban them from holding public offices in the future.
He said eschatology meant the theory of the last things, adding that the topic of his lecture was derived from the rhetorical question asked by Robert Lewis, who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan on August 6,1945, killing 130,000 people in less than one second.
“The eschatologist wonders why man insists on destroying himself. Why does he enjoy dragging himself or fellow human beings backward? Why does he relish in corruption, religious extremism, killing in the name of religion, cultism among others?” he asked.
Akintola said that the major area where Nigerians were retarding their own progress and destroying their future was corruption, which, he argued, had pervaded all fields of human endeavour in the country.
“Corruption has grown into such a canker-worm that every system decays at its touch. It has become a gangrene that must be burned out with hot iron and a cancerous tumour in the anatomy which must be cut off from the rest of the body in order to save the latter,” he said.
The don said what Nigerians needed was a change of mindset, the mind of an eschatologist with the apocalyptic fear of al-Akhirah, adding that it was not the possibility of being caught and jailed for corruption alone that should matter, but the fear of everlasting torture in hell fire.
