A lecturer with the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University Lapai (IBBUL), Professor Apegba Ker has urged the federal government to introduce Nigerian cultural studies in the country’s school curriculum at all levels in order to save our cultural values from extinction.
Professor Ker stated this Sunday in an inaugural lecture delivered at the university’s main campus in Lapai.
He said, “There is the need for relevant stakeholders in the nation building project to evolve some deliberate measures that would ensure adequate preservation and promotion of diverse cultural values and oral literature so as to prevent societies from shrinking into extinction”.
In the lecture titled: The Dynamics of Change – The Oral Artist and the Survival/Preservation of the Oral Form, Ker stated most of the things that used to hold societies together were being thrown away in the name of modernisation.
He warned that unless urgent steps are taken to reinvent and accord old good cultural values and oral literature their rightful place, the society was heading to doom.
Professor Ker, who is also the Dean, Faculty of Languages and Communication Studies of the university, stated that oral poetry had since in the times past played very significant role in building a better society.
He emphasised the relevance and impact of oral artists in entertaining, mobilising and educating the society to participate in national development programmes.
In a remark, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Muhammad Nasir Maiturare said the lecturer’s topic was in tune with emerging challenges threatening the peaceful co-existence of diverse ethnic nationalities in the country.
“This presentation will no doubt promote harmonious relationship among various ethnic backgrounds in the country. I therefore reaffirm the management’s readiness to support every intellectual effort that would make IBB University stand at a very competitive position with her peers the world over,” he said.
