Gbenro Adesina
The Vice Chancellor, BOWEN University, located in Iwo town of Osun State, Professor Joshua Olalekan Ogunwole has provided an insight into his growing up, saying that he was born into a poor family.
Featuring in a television programme, the don, who revealed that he made Second Class Lower in the university, noted that his parents could hardly provide food for the children when he was young.
He said, “My mother will use flour that is used to bake puff puff to prepare swallow. To swallow it is hard and so we will use water to push it down”.
According to him, he had to support the family by hawking all manners of wares in Kaduna, where he grew up saying the money realized from hawking went far in ameliorating poverty in his family.
“One thing I did was that at a point, I vowed to end poverty and suffering with my father. I really know hunger in my life”, he added.
Ogunwale gave various reasons why he could not study Medicine that his father wanted him to study, saying that Medicine books are so expensive and there was no way the father could have been able to buy just one book for him.
“My father wanted me to study Medicine and become a Medical doctor. Initially, I wanted to study Medicine but later I lost interest. First, one book in Medicine is very expensive and it can buy many books in other disciplines. There is no way my father could have been able to afford these books for me. Again, when I see medical students, I found out that they don’t have anytime for themselves. So, eventually, I studied Soil Science. When I graduated and I wanted to go for my Master Degree, my father was not happy because he felt that I needed to get a job and start earning salary so that I could support the family. But I told them that they have to be patient and the only way that we could write poverty off in my family is for me to read very well. I said I needed to pull myself out of poverty first before I could pull off other members of my family out of poverty. That was exactly what I did”.
