Lagos Dep Gov, Hamzat, Inaugurates UNILAG’S Digital Humanities Facilities Today

Sunday Okobi The Deputy Governor of Lagos State, Dr. Obafemi Kadri Hamzat, will today inaugurate the twin facilities of the Centre for Digital Humanities (CEDHUL), the University of Lagos’ flagship hub for research and training at the meeting point of culture and computation. While inaugurating the facilities, Hamzat will lend the full weight of the Lagos State Government to a project that speaks directly to the state’s ambition for innovation, youth empowerment and a future-ready workforce. Speaking ahead of the event, the first professor of Digital Humanities in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa and Founding Director of CEDHUL, Professor Babatunde Olusola Ope-Davies, said: “We are redefining the future of the Humanities… What we celebrate is the fruit of many hands: the university, our partners at home and abroad, and now the Government of Lagos State. We are grateful to His Excellency for standing with us as we open these doors to a new generation of African digital scholars.” The ceremony will also be attended by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Principal Officers, Deans, partners, scholars, students and members of the press at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos, Akoka. The inauguration, according to him, will mark a defining moment for CEDHUL, sub-Saharan Africa’s first dedicated Digital Humanities centre. “Founded in 2019, the Centre has grown from a bold idea into a continental reference point, where African languages, archives, cultures and stories meet data, computation and artificial intelligence. The twin facilities will now house the Centre’s Senate-approved Postgraduate Diploma, Master’s and Doctoral programmes in Digital Humanities, the first of their kind in the region,” he said. Ope-Davis added “Hamzat’s presence, and his personal act of inaugurating the facilities, signals a powerful alignment between the Lagos State Government’s vision of a smart, knowledge-driven megacity and the university’s mission to produce scholars who can read both the manuscript and the machine. An engineer, technocrat and long-standing advocate of innovation in public life, the deputy governor brings to the occasion a conviction that Lagos must not only consume technology but shape it.” He described the occasion as “the opening of a doorway, not just a building. “The facilities are where that meeting happens: where we are redefining the future of the humanities; where Africa’s inherited knowledge is preserved, interpreted and carried forward with the tools of the digital age. We are deeply honoured that His Excellency will inaugurate them.”