The University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), has mobilized its researchers, scholars and intellectuals as well as key stakeholders in the nation’s security sector to proffer solutions to the problem.
At a press briefing on the main campus of the university preceding an international conference on “Criminality and Violence as Growing Phenomena in the 21st Century Globalised World,” being organized by the university, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Charles Igwe, said no country can develop or make any meaningful progress without security of lives and property, and condemned the spate of terrorism, killings, kidnapping for ransom, rape, ritual killings and other atrocious crimes being committed daily in the country.
He stated that since the UNN was able to find solution to Nigeria’s energy problem by generating electricity from bio-waste products, and being the first university that produced Nigeria’s first electric vehicle, he was optimistic that the institution would also find solutions to the nation’s security challenges.
Convener of the conference and Director, University of Nigeria Printing Press, Prof. Florence O. Orabueze, said because of the crimes, violence acts of security challenges that besiege the country, the researchers and scholars in the academia could no longer afford to keep quiet while Nigeria “is at throes of strangulation.”
Prof. Orabueze called for a multi-disciplinary discourses that would provide a solution or solutions stressing that whenever the country is faced with challenges, either social, economic or health wise, it is the academia that provides solutions for them.
A former governor of Kano State, Senator Ibrahim Shekarau, will deliver the keynote address at the conference which will take place at Nsukka campus of the institution from July 29 to 31, 2019. It is being organized by the Grace Uzoma Okonkwo Foundation in collaboration with the Department of English and Literary Studies of the UNN.