BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
Text of the Address Delivered by the Vice-Chancellor, University of Ilorin,
Professor Is-haq O. Oloyede, on the Occasion of the Colloquium on Collaboration
between Engineers and Medical Experts organised by the University of Ilorin on
January 14, 2010.
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this occasion. I also want to congratulate those of us who are here. This
is because one thing is certain: at the end of this colloquium, we will be better informed and be more educated
than we were before it. You will all agree with me that a colloquium of this nature should have come up before
now. That notwithstanding, it is better late than never and it is my belief that we will all take advantage of the
insights it will provide us so that we can also apply the discussions to our own areas of interest.
There is an inscription at the gate of the University of Cordoba, Spain. It reads: “This world is held up by four
formidable pillars: the wisdom of the learned, the justice of the great; the prayers of the righteous and the
valour of the brave.” We are here this morning in our task of holding the world together through the first of the
four pillars that have not allowed us to perish: the wisdom of the learned.
I also think everyone of us should belong to at least one of the four categories. It is even better if some of us
can combine some or all of the four. If you are not learned, it is not too late to learn. If you are not just, you
can begin now and you will be great. If you are not prayerful, know that prayer, powered by righteousness, is
the soul of life and the dearth of it, in sincerity, has made our modern life soulless. And if you are not brave, be
a man of valour; fight for what is right and do what is right. It is better late than never and it is never too late
to start what is good and noble.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, one of the implications of the dotcom burst and globalization is that we
cannot just sit down in our corner and think we are making progress. Rather, we have to collaborate, network,
interface and cooperate with others. We cannot cuddle up in our cocoons and think we are the best. Rather, we
should make what we have available so that others can give us ideas, which translate to growth and
development. The old word is ‘hoard’; the new word is ‘share’. The old world was round; the new world is flat,
providing a level playing ground.
As members of the ivory tower, one of the academic myths that the force of globalization is fast dismantling is
the compartmentalization of knowledge. Knowledge is cumulative and interconnected. The scientist and the
humanist, the engineer and the lawyer, the educationist and the social scientist, the doctor and the artist
would have to realize that they are all connected. As such, collaboration is the way forward, not isolation;
cooperation is the right course, not alienation; integration is the correct answer, not compartmentalization.
It is based on the foregoing that at the University of Ilorin, emphasis is now placed more on collaborative
research activities. No one is an island and we are all social beings. There is nothing stopping a collaboration
between a lecturer in the Department of Religions and another one in the Department of Chemistry in the uses
and study of water. In the same vein, a lecturer of Yoruba and another one in Mathematics Department can
jointly appraise the corpus of binary system in traditional divination. Lawyers and doctors have to work
together on the legal implications of medical processes like euthanasia or mercy killing and many other issues
of that nature. There are still many areas of research where cooperation will yield insightful contributions to
knowledge and such areas are still waiting for scholarly attention. We have not been doing much of this but
the argument is that it is better late than never and we should be inspired by this programme to work more
closely together.
If I may bring my experience as an inter-faith enthusiast and a student of religion to bear on this, some of us
may not realize that our major religions, Islam and Christianity, have more in common than in contrast. But
as a result of open mischief, crass ignorance and sheer indiscretion, people don’t seem to see the similarities
but rather focus on the differences. The contributions of religion to personal, social and national development
are left untapped and what is often repeated by the intellectually lazy ones is the outdated song of Karl Marx:
‘religion is the opium of the masses’. Besides, the truth of the matter is that most problems associated with
religion are not religious. The Nigerian experience is that socio-political crises have always been adorned the
toga of religion while the problem is not always with the religion, it is with the people. That is why the deeper
one is in religion, the more one comes to understand the other.
Lest I digress further, we all know what a colloquium means. It is an informal meeting of minds to discuss
something. Beyond the formal definition, I think it is not less than a gathering of those who know and those
who don’t know so that those who know may showcase what they know and those who don’t may demonstrate
their ignorance. I think the idea is that there is a bit of sense in every nonsense if we are patient enough to
remove the prefix ‘non’ from it. Besides, demonstrating ignorance is not a crime; but insisting on ignorance is
a grave error. That is the idea of a colloquium to my understanding. Since we have resource persons here, I
urge you all to demonstrate what you know or what you do not know after they have made their presentations
so that such submissions would constitute parts of what we shall all know and demonstrate when there is a
another colloquium in its real informal sense.
The issue before us today is simple and straightforward. It borders on development and we can explain it as
follows: Health is wealth and nothing can be achieved without it. For effective and efficient health delivery, the
appropriate technology is required. Since technology is meant to serve human beings to achieve development,
there should be ways, unexplored yet, through which improved medicare can be assured through good
engineering and technological gadgets/inventions. It is on this note that people in health science as well as
engineering and technology are pooled to lead the discussion on the way forward to improving our health
through the instrumentation of technology. Since all technology is culture-based, it would be insightful to
know what aspects of our indigenous technology can be used, developed or upgraded to serve the purpose of
our quest for better and healthier living.
This is what we are here for. It is now time to talk the talk with the hope that we will have ideas to work on
when the time is ripe to walk the talk.
Once again, you are all welcome. Thank you for your attention.