Legal luminary and founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti, Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), on Thursday suggested that professionals should occupy 40 per cent of the seats of the National Assembly.
Babalola said having such quantity of professionals at that level of government would “stop recycling of failed leaders or breeding of transactional leaders.
The election of professionals will give us full and equitable representation devoid of elections of legislators who are sponsored by godfathers.”
He spoke in Ado Ekiti during the closing of a four-day regional workshop for implementation of Outcome-Based Education in engineering programmes in Nigerian universities organised by the Council for the Regulation of Engineers in Nigeria.
He said, “I hereby suggest that professionals representing each profession like medicine, engineering, law, accounting, banking and finance, journalism, civil society organisations etc should account for 40 per cent of the total number of legislators in the National Assembly.
“It will enable knowledgeable, selfless, patriotic and no-tribalistic Nigerians to emerge as leaders. It will obliterate the negative accolade of Nigeria running the most expensive democracy in the world.”
Babalola also advocated 20 per cent of the National Assembly seats for women “while the remaining 40 per cent will be contested generally by Nigerians.”
The ABUAD founder appealed to engineers not to take the back seat in the nation’s politics, adding that their interest in politics would help them in formulating the right policies and cognate academic curriculum for the profession.
