27th January, 2019
The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, Mrs Georgina Ehuriah, has advised children and youths to spend more time on reading than on watching football.
Ehuriah gave this advise on the sidelines of the “Guest Writers Session” organised by the Abuja Writers Forum in Abuja on Saturday.
“The long hours our children spend watching football, is not the right way to go.
”I believe we can reduce the time our children spend following all the league games and devote more of that time to intellectual pursuit and developing their abilities to reason and understanding the ways of the world.
”I think reading is the best form of exposure anybody can have because when you read, you are transported to other parts of the world and their ways of life.
”You begin to dream to be better and you look at your surroundings in a different way.
”If you are put in any situation where you can make a difference, it becomes very easy for you because in your mind you are already elevated and you already know how things work in other climes,” she said.
Ehuriah said that parents should understand what was obtainable in the 21st century in terms of reading, adding that technology had overtaken the traditional ways of reading.
According to her, to prevent parents from having high blood pressure, there is a need to understand what this generation actually has going for it.
“It may not necessarily be seeing your child with a hard copy. Children now read on the internet, that is e-library and so on.
“We should not keep trying to pull them back into our world. I grew up in a world where there was no internet, so I believe every generation has its own thing going for it,” she added.
Guest writers, Japheth Prosper, a writer and Achissan Agoh a poet, advised upcoming writers not to write for monetary gain but out of a passion to make a difference and impact lives. (NAN)