Like a season movie that is yet to climax, the last seems not to have been heard of the sacking of 15 lecturers, two non- academic staff and the demotion of two others by the Governing Council of the Lagos State University, as more facts have continued to emerge about the issue.
One of the sacked lecturers, Dr. Isaac Oyewunmi, who was the branch chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Universities in LASU, said recently that the allegations against him were mere victimisation and that it was “shameful” that LASU relied on “ghost petition” to sack him.
He had said, “If you can even prove that I demanded some amount of money from those students, nothing more than that, and some people actually collected money, it is politics of activism and we are used to it. But it is actually shameful.
“When you have incidents of a ghost petition and then you use the evidence of a third party to rubbish the career of another – well, it’s interesting; we are enjoying it honestly.”
But, as it turns out, the person who wrote the petition against Oyewunmi has come out to state his side of the story. In an exclusive interview with our correspondent earlier in the week, the petitioner, Mr. Alabi Abiodun, an ex- student of LASU, revealed how the sacked lecturer allegedly delayed the processing of the result of seven students of the (2007) set for six years because they refused to pay the N50,000 bribes he allegedly demanded from each of them. In the course of the delay, Alabi said he lost two job offers because his result was not ready and that it took the intervention of the former governor of the state, Babatunde Fashola, to get their results.
In a narrative that turned out to be very interesting, Alabi said he gained admission into LASU in 2003 to study Political Science under the sandwich programme. It was a three-year course, but due to strike actions along the line, he graduated in 2007, instead of 2006. He noted that his experience while the programme lasted was sweet and productive. But after graduation, that sweet experience was soon replaced with frustration, Alabi said. He continued, “At the end of the programme in 2007, we were made to know that Dr. Isaac Oyewunmi would be the one to coordinate and process our result for onward submission, as he performed that responsibility for the entire department.
We were optimistic that in no time, our results would be ready, more so that we were just seven in the class.” Alabi noted that most of them sponsored themselves to school and so they could not wait to lay their hands on their result to start looking for job and earn better living. But throughout that year, there was no update about the result.
“By 2008, we discovered that nothing was happening as regards our result, so we approached Dr. Oyewunmi again. He said yes, he wanted to help us but that he had been using his money to make photocopies of the result, which had been delaying the work.
