Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, has written to the Council for Legal Education (CLE) over the purported refusal of the council to admit graduates of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) into the Nigerian Law School.

Chief Obasanjo is a NOUN graduate himself!

According to Premium Times, Obasanjo disclosed this at his Hilltop mansion in Abeokuta, Ogun state, while addressing members of NOUN Law Students Association of Nigeria and other alumni of the university who paid him a courtesy visit.

The meeting at the former president’s house was a sequel to his visitation to NOUN Abeokuta Study Centre in August last year when the school management sought his intervention on the law students’ admission into the Nigeria Law School.

Obasanjo, who himself graduated from NOUN and is currently undertaking master and Ph.D programmes in the institution, made it clear that NOUN is running a full-time study and not a correspondence programme.

He added that he physically receives lectures in the institution and not through correspondence.

“I have written to the CLE but it seems some people out there didn’t get it right. They said the school of law is offering correspondence programmes and I said it to anyone I met that I graduated from the school and I am presently running my master and Ph.D in NOUN, so the notion is incorrect,” he said.

The former commander-in-chief said the failure to recognise NOUN courses is undermining the whole institution, and such development will be resisted.

He stressed that NOUN is a new institution which is growing daily, adding that the management of the institution are also working hard to get the institution to the optimum standard.

However, he urged students of NOUN, especially law graduates, to be patient with the authorities, stressing that getting accredited could not come automatically.

For sometime now, troubled students of the NOUN have been agitating with regards to certain privileges denied them by the Nigerian education board. The students of the institution, which has not been fully recognised, have over the years been denied the chance to join the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) and the Nigerian Law School.

But Michael Abikoye, the director of NOUN’s Ilorin Study Centre, has said that graduates of the institution would soon be allowed to participate in the schemes from which they have been left out in the previous years

Lalasticlala, Mynd44