Crescent University Holds 5th Convocation Lecture

The 5th Convocation lecture of Crescent University, Abeokuta tagged “Islamic Education and Peaceful Co-existence: Whither Nigeria?” was delivered by the former Vice Chancellor, University of Ilorin, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede.

In his lecture, Oloyede attributed causes of religious tension in Nigeria to incompatibility of interests, negative attitudes such as insincerity, deceit and falsehood, and behaviour co-hersion such as hostility and threat.

He said “one may add ignorance to the list but the overall cause , in our view, are the nature of man and failure of the environment to adequately tame animalistic and selfish tendencies inherent in human nature”.

Oloyede argued that multicultural societies needed to choose the appropriate approach to peaceful existence of their respective society as the choice was limited to disintegration, splitting or formal polarisation, assimilation, integration through which different groups were induced to forgo their own peculiar values and pluralism which h said was the best option.

He said history was replete with records to support pluralism as the only approach towards permanent peace and stressed that injustice which neutralises earlier world powers is still potent to abort the perpetuation of the present exploitative socio-economic world-order.