Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Awards sponsors 20 indigent undergraduates through school.

A total of 20 undergraduates selected from tertiary institutions across the country, Friday, received this year’s Gani Fawehinmi Scholarship Awards for indigent students, in Lagos.

The annual awards, which began in 1973, have empowered about 800 students, according to the scholarship’s Awards Board.

In his speech, Dipo Fashina, chairman of the board, stated that the number of recipients was reviewed up from 12 last year because there were thousands of indigent students.

“When we discussed with Chief (Gani Fawehinmi), he was concerned about Nigerian children who were very brilliant but indigent,” Mr. Fashina, a former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, said.

“There was another thing Chief was concerned about, the disparities in the distribution of education in Nigeria. That there must be a reflection of the fact that there are bright students all over Nigeria,” Mr. Fashina added.

Earlier, while delivering a lecture titled ‘After Education, What Next?’, Festus Iyayi noted that the nation’s education system lies “in chaos.”

“We can provide hundreds of examples of this chaos at all levels of the formal and informal educational process,” Mr. Iyayi, a professor at the Department of Business Administration, University of Benin, said.

“The disgrace in the formal system not only exists at the secondary school level but at the primary and tertiary levels as well,” he said. “Elements of the chaos can be found in a variety of practices and outcomes at each of these levels.”

In his opening remarks, ASUU President, Nassiru Isa, stated that the union has continuously participated in activities relating with Mr. Fawehinmi.