By Nwafor Okafor
His name is Charles Chukwuma Soludo. His mother died when he was an 8-year-old child. He is a professor of Economics, a former Chief Economic Advisor to former President Olusegun Obasanjo, and a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). He was born into a poor family. But, education has transformed him to be a very important person. In 1984, he graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Enugu state, where he bagged a First-Class honours degree in Economics. From the same university, he earned M.Sc. in Economics and a PhD in Economics in 1987 and 1989 respectively. And, he was the best graduating student at all levels. By 1998, he became a Professor of Economics. As a university don, he authored over 82 scholarly publications. As a visiting professor, he was once a lecturer at Swarthmore College, USA; Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick University, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; Wolfson College, UN Economic Commission for Africa as a post-doctoral fellow and the International Monetary Fund. As I write this, he is the second former CBN Governor to become a Governor in Nigeria.
From this brief history, we can learn that poverty brings only temporary challenges to human life if at all we are determined to fight it. Soludo’s life background, as a case study, proves that the best powerful equipment to change a human being is education. With education, you can become anything in life. Please, don’t feel discouraged that you come from a poor family. With education, you can even overtake those from well-to-do families. With education, the sky is the starting point for your journey to success. I, therefore, call on youth to go to school, read hard and become well equipped with knowledge. With knowledge, one day, your life story would be completely different just like that of Mr Soludo.
Congratulations, Prof. Soludo, the newly elected Governor of Anambra State.
