The Reverend Doctor Titus Kolawole Oyeyemi, Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of African Projects/Foundation for Peace and Love Initiatives (APPLI/AFPLI), welcomes back to this platform all graduate and undergraduate members of KAIROS Peace and Love Club (KPLC) UNILAG Chapter, after a long lull that resulted from the global COVID-19 pandemic that ravaged the world for two years in 2020 and 2021. I thank God for making you a survivor of the pandemic.
KPLC is one of our NGO’s (non-governmental organisation’s) four school-based peace clubs targeted at undergraduates at Nigerian tertiary institutions, such as universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. The other school-based peace clubs are the African Children of Peace Clubs (ACPC) directed at children in nursery and primary schools; Youth Peace Alliance Clubs (Y-PAC), directed at youths in secondary schools; and National Peace Legacy Clubs (NPLC), directed at Nigerian graduates doing their one-year National Youth Corps Services (NYSC) across the nation.
At APPLI/AFPLI we have conceptualized the initiatives that we have described as proactive grassroots peacebuilding for ethnoreligious and ethnopolitical harmony. We believe that if these initiatives are conscientiously developed and embraced by the African nations, through the processes of Structured Education for Peace (SEP) and Sociocultural Adjustment Programs (SAP), it could result in the cultivation of new constituencies of youth peace and nation builders. The fertile grounds to cultivate, nurture, grow and develop the new constituencies shall be the school-based peace clubs, which could feed into community-based, peaceful co-existence, otherwise being conceptualized as co-existence education, which by some strands are regarded as Peace and Conflict Education (PACE) and Culture of Peace Education (COPE).
Because Peace and Conflict Education (PACE) cannot be taught only in abstract academics, we have introduced the cultural aspects of peace education that we have coined COPE: Culture of Peace Education. It is our desire that by working with the instrumentality of our school-based peace clubs, we will encourage the young populace to grow and cultivate necessary cultures of peacebuilding for co-existence as they advance in age from infancy through adolescence to adulthood.
And because our school-based peace clubs are age-driven, we have designed and developed a number of age-relevant curricula. For example: We use the book Growing with Peace for African Children of Peace Clubs (ACPC). For the Youth Peace Alliance Clubs (Y-PAC), we use Cultivating Youth Peace and Nation Building curriculum, a 52-week peace education curriculum, teaching peace to secondary school students. Along with this curriculum we use a project-focused work called Evaluating Peace Education as Mainstream Curriculum: A Study of Nigerian Junior Secondary Schools (2012). For the KAIROS Peace and Love Clubs (KPLC) and the National Peace Legacy Clubs (NPLC), a 40-curriculum book, titled Equipping the New African Peacebuilder: A Peacebuilder’s Curriculum (2012), is used. Both books, Evaluating and Equipping, were authored by the Rev. Dr. Titus Kolawole Oyeyemi, the Founding President and CEO of APPLI/AFPLI.
Our library is stocked with a huge collection of peace education books, including a compendium of 50 speeches that Dr. Oyeyemi used to teach peace education between 2005 and 2010. Beginning in 2011, when the United Nations recognized and accredited APPLI/AFPLI as an NGO teaching proactive grassroots peacebuilding education, the African Peace Annual Report has been published annually. In recent times, 2017 to be precise, Dr. Oyeyemi published the booklet A Tree of Peace Is Growing in Nigeria: The Story of APPPI/AFPLI. Many of these publications are available on the Internet.
Over the years we have promoted our desires to institutionalize our concept of proactive grassroots peacebuilding for ethnoreligious and ethnopolitical harmony. In 2010 we established TimeOn KAIROS Peace Education Institute, which has been recognized and approved by the Lagos State Ministry of Education as a model community college. The college became TimeOn KAIROS Community College (TKCC) in 2021 to enjoy official government-approved, secondary-school status in Lagos State. In 2014 the TimeOn KAIROS Educational and Vocational Institute (TKEVI) was incorporated; it became accredited in 2016 by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE). In October 2018 the TimeOn KAIROS Polytechnic was accredited by NBTE. Current efforts are being undertaken to affiliate TimeOn KAIROS Peace Institute with the Urban and Regional Planning Department of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), to be eventually accredited for full-fledged peace institute for PACE and COPE by the NBTE. We are therefore moving with the times and the trends as we go into 2022 and beyond with optimism and expectations. Some of those expectations may include the publication of an Album and Directory of our Alumni since 2005 to present.
Let me use this opportunity to once again commend you, Mr. Adeola Ogunlade, coordinator of our KAIROS Peace and Love Clubs (KPLC) and lecturer of our weekly Friday Online Peace Lectures (FOPL). Mr. Ogunlade, a journalist with the Nations and a two-time participant at the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa, has been with our NGO since 2008, during his undergraduate years at the Tai Solarin University of Education.
Thank you for reading. I wish each of you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.