A Professor of Geography and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lagos State University, Prof Ayo Omotayo, has urged the Federal Government to make geography a compulsory subject at both the primary and secondary levels of education in the country.
Omotayo said that this would go a long way in saving the country’s immediate environment. He said government should reorder its educational priorities through a new curriculum to stress an appreciable understanding of the environment by adopting geography as a compulsory subject in schools.
The don said this while delivering the university’s 56th inaugural lecture entitled, “Are We Living In A Dying Earth?” at the Main Auditorium, Ojo campus, where he stressed that the third world environment could be saved from unsustainable exploitation by instituting a mechanism that would dissuade over- exploitation of resources.
According to him, African countries were being forced to give up natural exploitation rights to developed countries in order to pay off debts and most often negotiations had always left the countries poorer.
“One of the negative effects of man’s activities has been the increasing rate at which the desert is advancing in the Sudano-Sahara region of West Africa. It is a process of land degradation in arid, semiarid, dry sub-humid areas caused by changes in climatic factors, human and animal activities”, he said.
Omotayo also suggested that government should constitute a national conference on environmental law and sustainable development, adding that this meeting would help to resolve “several conflicts that people face in the enactment of environmental law, the judicial process and the natural law as they really are.
“Another step for government to take is to eradicate poverty, especially as it exists in rural areas and for government to begin a re-industrialisation of the country along safe and sustainable development paths. We must state that the countries that will make it in future are those that will benefit from the use of free renewable energy sources that nature bequeaths us.”
