Mr. Waterhouse, High Commissioner, Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I have always been a great admirer of the work of the British Council and try to visit its operations wherever I go, and I am particularly pleased, therefore, to be able to open this building this morning and that will mark a further stage in the development of British Council operations in Lagos and in Nigeria as a whole it will make the British Council operation the second-largest in the world—only greater in India, which is very much bigger (applause).
We have been in Nigeria for a long time, since 1943, and since that time some 35,000—a whole generation of Nigerians—have profited from our work and have been and had educational help and technical training in Britain.
At this time, about 800 Nigerians a year, usually supported by grants from the Overseas Development Administration, come to our country for technical training, professional help, administrative help—whatever kind of help they need—so they get our support there and when they return here, we are able to keep in continuing contact with them to give them any further help they need and in any case, we like to keep contact with our past students and to extend our operations.
I am also very pleased to be able to announce today that the Council is to re-open its libraries in Nigeria (applause). About [end p1] ten years ago, some of them were closed because it was feared that they might duplicate the activities of public libraries which the Council itself had set up, but the demand for access to British books, our audio-visual materials and videos, has increased so much that we must re-open the libraries once again and so libraries in Kaduna and Kano will be ready very soon; that in Lagos will re-open in this building later in the year and in Enugu the library will re-open as soon as we can find suitable accommodation, and I hope and believe this will be widely welcomed and the libraries very widely used.
That does not mean any diminution in our activities. Indeed, further programmes are being planned, particularly in the areas of technical education, public administration, agriculture and science education, and we shall also give full support to the Nigerian Government's own efforts to improve the quality of English teaching in schools and universities.
I just would finally like to stress the aspect of partnership in the Council's work. Nigeria has a distinguished culture of its own and many of its own literary and artistic achievements. That was most recently marked by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Professor Wole Soyinka.
Through the Council's work, we join forces with you, in partnership, to help in building Nigeria's future in every field of endeavour. We are proud to be able to do it and the point of this [end p2] new building is so that our efforts may be the more effective on your behalf and we are privileged to help.
I have great pleasure in opening this new building, I believe by cutting a tape, if I could very kindly have some scissors! (applause)