The Anglican Diocese of Lagos Mainland has urged President Goodluck Jonathan to do away with strict political consideration in assembling “a pan Nigerian team of the best brains wherever they may be found” in the task of nation building. Such people, the diocese said, should be competent, compassionate, and committed to a Greater Nigeria.

The Diocesan bishop, the Rt. Rev Adebayo Akinde, in his presidential address to the second session of the second synod, at the All Saints’ Church, Yaba. Akinde asked the president to”prayerfully seek divine guidance to tackle the agents of evil who wish to foster a culture of insecurity, darkness, ignorance, want, disease and joblessness”.

He charged the president to use his mandate to “breathe life into his public power/energy sector reforms”, warning, “the years of active people idling away because there is no electricity must end.”

He urged him “to put the factories back to life by injecting needed capital and enterprise”, asserting “when the barns are full and the the people are active there will be prosperity in the land”.

On the state of education in the country, he called for the return “of our universities and higher institutions to centres of research, excellence and academic scholarship where ideas are manufactured for the good health of society where students’ imagination is fired and thirst for knowledge is quenched. Akinde, a retired professor of computer science, decried the mushrooming of institutions, and called “ for the strengthening of the existing ones so that our graduates can command respect anywhere in the world and contribute their quota to national development”.