Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, has said that he did not just find himself at the top of the ladder of life without paying necessary price. He said he reached a height after engaging in odd and menial jobs such as driving public taxis and working as security guard both in Nigeria and during his postgraduate days in the United Kingdom.

Fayemi, who stated this yesterday while delivering the 49th convocation lecture at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, advised Nigerian youths to stop complaining and engaging in blame game, as no one owed them anything but themselves.

He said rather than getting angry about the system not working in Nigeria, the youth should think hard about possible solutions and do something about it, citing cases of the founders of Andela and Co-Creation Hub as technology centres doing the nation proud.

He said: “You have to be prepared to bend backwards and do what you might consider to be beneath you, because of the bigger picture.

“When you consider my resume today, you might see the prestigious organisations I have been privileged to work with.

What you need to know however, is that as UNILAG graduate and a postgraduate student in the UK, I have also driven taxis and worked as a security guard, among several other menial jobs I did in the past to survive.”

This is even as the former Ekiti State governor and member of the federal cabinet, defended the Buhari-led administration’s poor budgetary allocation to education, insisting that other competing demands would not have been abandoned for education sector alone.

According to Fayemi, the new administration would continue to accord priority to education but that other sectors of the national economy had also been badly affected by the long years of misrule.

New Telegraph