Fashola stops LASU from honouring Nigerians with awards

Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos state on Thursday said that he has directed the Lagos State University (LASU) to stop the conferments of awards in order to preserve respectability of such honours.

Fashola who spoke in Lagos at the 4th Gani Fawehinmi Colloquium themed “Consolidating Democratic Norms through Credible Electoral Process” said it was to make the award process more meritorious and honourable.

“My directive to the university is not because I am a saint or that there are no deserving people in our state the university can honour.

“On the contrary, I believe those awards are critical building blocks of the moral and development fibre of the society and I feel duty bound to ensure that we do not lose or destroy those blocks,” he said.

The governor urged Nigerians to guard the nation’s democracy jealously by shunning acts that could weaken or truncate it.

He advised Nigerians to embrace the right democratic values, which according to him, would strengthen governance and bring about development.

Fashola said the power to change the country for the better rested largely in the hands of the electorate and urged them to use it to bring about good leadership.

“The power to bring out change rests in your hands, the electorate. You can help change the country for the better by voting out bad leaders while keeping good ones,” he said.

The governor said the media had a big role to play in strengthening democratic norms by giving the people the right information.

He charged the media to be alive to its democratic responsibility by shunning partisanship and reporting only issues that promoted development.

Fashola described the late Fawehinmi as a man of many positive values and noted that the country would be better if it lived by some of these values.

Also speaking, constitutional lawyer, Prof. Itse Sagay, said democracy was a misnomer in the absence of the rule of law.

He urged Nigerians to always respect and obey the law as that would help strengthen democracy.