By: Dele Omoguyigbe
What to make of another allegation of sexual harassment against a professor in the Department of English at the University of Lagos is confusing.
Is it that professors are jinxed or that female students are in thundering rage? I only hope that the fresh incident and others like it are not a sheer abuse of the social media by desperate students!
Academic institutions are not firm yet on the way students should engage the social media and the result is what we are having currently. Regrettably, the unnamed professor whose description in the papers exposed his identity is committed, cheerful and easy-going as I knew him.
He was one of the best-loved lecturers in the department when I was there as a PG student, though he was not a professor then. Perhaps I should end the accolades there lest I become a victim of indiscretion. Shakespeare warns in Macbeth that, there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Whatever the case, I don’t want to believe that the professorial seat plants extra libido in men, even if OAU’s related story of alleged five rounds demand by a professor suggested it. The stench of that scandal still pervades the atmosphere.
The Senate’s business with the OAU sex case is what I can’t place. Yesterday, they commenced investigation into it and I wondered what concerned them. They should tell us what they are looking for since universities have the capacity to manage their affairs themselves.
This senate is encroaching too much on other institutions’ territories and challenging their autonomy, whereas, often, they are faulted by law. Maybe they will also investigate the current sex-for-marks allegation at Unilag, and many more allegations to come from other institutions.
It is important that they count universities and polytechnics out of the areas on which to exercise oversight functions. What are NUC and NBTE for? Our senators sure have unequalled appetite for encumbrances and hypocritical actions. The Mace was stolen from the chamber under their noses and nothing happened. When it was later found under a remote bridge in their kingdom, they still had no answer. Dino Melaye, their emperor, threatened to beat up a female senator and impregnate her; none of them saw that to investigate. Perhaps they need somebody to tell them that Dino’s sexual harassment of Remi Tinubu, was worse than the cases of the two OAU and Unilag professors put together.
If our distinguished senators are oblivious of their role as lawgivers and law-keepers, we, ordinary people, can volunteer to teach them under an unusual condition of role reversal. Universities have no research grants; senators aren’t investigating that. Neither are they contemplating to cut their satanic salaries and allowances by three-quarters to allow more funds flow into researches. God is not in their salary and allowance, they must know that.
It is blatant robbery to collect such humongous wages even in Kuwait. Certainly, here is one senate which no Nigerian will miss after they are dispersed.
Bukola Saraki should be a good leader by all standards. He has the education, the experience and the family background. For once, Nigeria should be proud to have somebody like him as head of senate but his occupation of the position lacks consensual political legitimacy, even if he holds it constitutionally.
That has been the problem and also the reason most things waver in the upper house. The initial distrust and rancor which emerged from his controversial emergence as president have refused to go. It is a lesson for next time.
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