Fashola faults national awards to political office holders

Fashola faults national awards to political office holders

on September 25, 2014   /   in News 9:57 pm   /   Comments

Lagos –  Gov. Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State on Thursday said that the award of national honours to political office holders was inappropriate.

Fashola spoke in Lagos at the 4th Gani Fawehinmi Colloquium organised by the Gani Fawehinmi Chambers of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos.

He said that the practice undermined the culture of hard work as it presumed recipients had done exceptionally well in the service of the nation, even when they had not completed their terms in office.

Fashola said national honours should, ideally, be conferred on people based on retrospective assessment of their achievements and the impact they had made to national development.


Fashola
The  theme of the colloquium was “ Consolidating Democratic Norms through Credible Electoral Process.“

“The concept of giving public officers national awards simply offends, because I ask, what will you give to such persons after he has left office and has done well?

“You see, we can use the game of football to explain why this is not appropriate. Will FIFA stop a game at half-time and say let’s give the Most Valuable Player award to this or that player because he has done well?

“ No, that is only done at the end of the game. Or will fans or people congratulate a striker for instance, for goals he has not scored? No, things are not done that way.

“ The whole idea undermines the culture of hard work and it is better we start recognising people the right way and for the right reasons,’’ he said.

Fashola also decried the arbitrary conferment of awards on people by tertiary institutions and other organisations, saying this promoted wrong values in the country.

He said the conferment of such honours should be strictly for exceptional and deserving individuals and not for pecuniary expectations or other favours.

According to him, the Lagos State University (LASU) has been directed to suspend the conferment of awards in order to preserve respectability of such honours.

“My directive to the university is not because I am a saint or that there are no deserving people in our state the university can honour.

“On the contrary, I believe those awards are critical building blocks of the moral and development fibre of the society and I feel duty bound to ensure that we do not lose or destroy those blocks,“ he said.

The governor urged Nigerians to guard the nation`s democracy jealously by shunning acts that could weaken or truncate it.

He advised Nigerians to embrace the right democratic values, which according to him, would strengthen governance and bring about development.

Fashola said the power to change the country for the better rested largely in the hands of the electorate and urged them to use it to bring about good leadership.

“The power to bring out change rests in your hands, the electorate. You can help change the country for the better by voting out bad leaders while keeping good ones,’’ he said.

The governor said the media had a big role to play in strengthening democratic norms by giving the people the right information.

He charged the media to be alive to its democratic responsibility by shunning partisanship and reporting only issues that promoted development.

Fashola described the late Fawehinmi as a man of many positive values and noted that the country would be better if it lived by some of these values.

Also speaking, constitutional lawyer, Prof. Itse Sagay, said democracy was a misnomer in the absence of the rule of law.

He urged Nigerians to always respect and obey the law as that would help strengthen democracy.

Earlier, Prof. Akin Ibidapo-Obe, the Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, commended Fashola for the support he had rendered to the faculty.

He said that the support, which covered sponsorship of students and participation in overseas academic competitions, had helped deepen legal training in the faculty.

Credit: Vanguard.