David Okpako

David Okpako attended primary schools at Owahwa, and Oginibo in Ughelli South Local Government Area of Delta State Nigeria; his secondary schools were Baptist High School, Port Harcourt and Urhobo College Effurun. He went on to study Pharmacy at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology Ibadan, and London and Bradford universities in the United Kingdom, gaining the PhD in pharmacology in December 1967. After a postdoctoral MRC fellowship at University College London, he returned to Nigeria in 1968 and taught first at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, and from 1969 till retirement in 1990, at the University of Ibadan where he was promoted to professor of pharmacology in October 1977. In recent years, Professor Okpako has given expression in his writings to the idea that solutions to some of Africa’s development problems are to be found, not in the Euro-American models frequently adopted by Africa’s educated elite, but in knowledge and experience embedded in traditional African institutions.