Acting President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday hosted Pakistani youth activist, Malala Yousafzai, at the Presidential Villa.
The youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize winner led a delegation from her Malala Fund led on the visit.
Commending the 20-year-old who survived a gun attack by the Taliban in 2012, Osinbajo noted that “your story is an inspiration for not only young women around the world but for us all.”
According to him, “Your ability to articulate issues and the courage to face down hatred and terrorism is widely acknowledged.”
The acting president observed that while there is a connection between terrorism on the one hand and poverty and ignorance on the other, the challenge that terrorism poses on a global scale is much deeper considering cases of terrorism and hatred even in advanced societies where ignorance and poverty were not rampant.
“We have to change the mind-set and delegitimise the false ideas and notions of hatred and violence,” he added.
“Getting people to enrol in school is the easier part of the problem. The bigger one is to ensure that we don’t promote the mind-set that girls are in anyway inferior and all that.”
Also present at the meeting were Minister of Women Affairs, Aisha Alhassan; Director Centre for Girls Edu, Habiba Mohammed; Girl Advocate from Centre for Girls Education, Amina Yusuf, and Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.
Malala, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education, said after the meeting: “It was a very good meeting. We had a fruitful discussion with his excellency, the acting president.
“I highlighted the need to scale up education, that the government should declare a state of emergency in education because education of girls and boys in Nigeria is important.
“The federal, state and local governments need to be united on this. My goal is that no child should be deprived of the basic right that they have.
“So, I am campaigning for this and I hope that all my Nigerian brothers and sisters can also go to school and learn.”
Malala first visited Nigeria in July, 2014 to campaign for the release of Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents.
She met then President Goodluck Jonathan and parents of the more than 230 captured Chibok schoolgirls, prompting a hitherto nonchalant Nigerian government to take the abduction serious.
