ASUU, others eulogise Iyayi at UNIBEN Heroes Day

Members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Benin branch, friends and associates have eulogised the late erudite scholar and comrade, Prof. Festus Iyayi, describing him as a mystery in the educational development of the nation.

Speaking at the third memorial lecture organized by ASUU in honour of the late Iyayi who died on November 12, 2013 in a motor accident along the Benin-Lokoja- Abuja Expressway, Chairman of the occasion and Vice Chancellor University of Medical Sciences, Prof. Friday Okonofua described him as a phenomena.

In a lecture delivered in his honour titled “An Emergent Nation State and its Albatross” by Dr. Olatunde Oduleye, he said the life of the late comrade was a mystery and a compendium of stupendous and prodigious positive human virtues. “All of the virtues credited to Iyayi obviously radiated from an intense ideological core of the Marxist extraction,” he said.

Oduleye, while trying to redefine the nation’s political class said it had been sufficiently and consistently destructive of national development effort. He said the moral decadence of the political class was an epidemic nature. “In the history of our political development, we can recall a few ordinarily decent patriotic and progressive Nigerians who made the error of joining the class to reform it from within. Not only has this been a colossal failure, some of them were eliminated while others were assimilated.”

According to him, “The project of transforming Nigeria and positioning it for the greatness made potentially possible by its human and natural resources has gone beyond the stage of electoral reform, party sloganeering, monitoring sham bourgeois elections, call for restructuring, respect for human rights, appeal for transparency, enthroning good governance, fight against corruption or even the polemics of “change” presently in the air. The project requires not access to power but its control”.