Unilorin 5 And Oba’s Reign Of Terror—Wumi Raji

I am not sure Professor Ishaq Oloyede, current Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, remembers this incident. Two people who used to be very close friends had fallen apart with each other and the disagreement was to the extent that they would not even exchange common greetings with each other. One day, one of them got appointed to a new job somewhere in Lagos, and as a mutual friend of the two started thinking of how to get the letter of appointment across to the lucky man, the other one suddenly showed up. Would he then agree to deliver the letter to his friend since he was immediately returning to the town where the latter resided? He was hesitant but he agreed all the same – and he did deliver the letter! This incident occurred in 1996 or thereabout, and Oloyede and I were trying to review the latest development in the relationship between the two friends. In the end, the scholar of Islamic Studies had told me in words to this effect: ‘It is human to quarrel, but it is not good to do so as if it would never end – as if you would never need each other again.’

 

To be sure, Professor Ishaq Oloyede and quite a number of people affected by the Ilorin dismissals used to be quite close. He used to be very active in the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, as well, and they used to work together. In the long-drawn crisis in which the University has been engulfed since 2001, however, Oloyede fought openly against his unionist friends. And the way the battle had been fought, at least in my judgment, was as if it would never end; as if the two sides would never have anything to do together again. And my question to Oloyede at this moment when the Supreme Court has ordered the reinstatement of five of the dismissed lecturers is, whether he had ever given a thought to the possibility of the University having to recall the lecturers one day, and him being the one who has to take the responsibility of welcoming them back.

The crisis started as a local matter. Ilorin was a second generation university, and it took off in 1975 as a campus of the University of Ibadan. Within the first two decades of its existence, the university had managed to establish a reputation as a major centre in teaching, research and scholarship. The Vice-Chancellors who gave the university direction during this period included Professor Akinkugbe, Professor Afolabi Toye, Professor Adeoye Adeniyi and Professor John Oyinloye. They were all renowned scholars in the first place, and also great believers in academic tradition. They respected the rules and regulations governing the administration of the institution, and observed due process in all the steps they took. Of course, there were moments of friction between the administration and different staff unions in the university, but these were often resolved through dialogue and negotiation.

Professor Shuaib Oba AbdulRaheem became vice-chancellor of the university in 1997. Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of English at Bayero University, Kano. In fairness, the reports that followed him from the Kano down to Ilorin were mainly positive. He was said to be a very prominent member of the university’s branch of ASUU, and a strong defender of the interests and welfare of staff and students. AbdulRaheem was received with open arms in Ilorin and, in taking off, it was as if he was himself determined to uphold the reputation that had followed him down from his place of primary appointment. Expectations were high that he would carry on with the tradition with which the university had become known: that he would maintain peace, observe due process in appointments and promotions, respect the unions of staff and students and treat people justly and fairly.

It was not long before people began to realise that things might not work out as they had imagined. The first indication they got came through the process Professor AbdulRaheem adopted in appointing people to vacant positions in the university. Normally, the practice was to advertise, harvest applications, shortlist and invite people for interview and thereafter appoint based on qualifications and performance at interviews. With the coming of Professor AbdulRaheem however, what used to be adopted in urgent and exceptional cases whereby individuals would first be issued with a letter of temporary appointment, following which an interview which must be held within one year to regularise the appointments would be arranged became the norm. Indeed, 70 per cent of the appointments made into administrative and academic positions in the university within AbdulRaheem’s first 18 months in office were carried out this way. Always, it was appointment first, interview later! What is more: talking in terms of the ethnic origins of the beneficiaries, the appointments were clearly lopsided.

Besides, an indication that workers might not have it smooth-sailing under Oba AbdulRaheem when it came to matters of entitlements became manifest after the first promotion exercise he initiated. In all fairness, when the man first came into office in 1997, promotions had been due for two years running, and this was how it happened that the exercise that he initiated in 1998 was for 1996. People were in fact initially happy since, as it appeared, individual staff progress was going to be paramount on the man’s mind. The exercise went well, in fact, and it was not until the beneficiaries started receiving their letters that they realised that a major coup had been carried out against them. This is because, as their letters clearly stated, the promotion would take effect only notionally from 1996. In monetary terms however, the effective date would be October 1998. People were shocked, to say the least. Promotions had always been late in the university, no doubt, but what always cushioned the agony of waiting were the arrears of salaries that beneficiaries always received when eventually the exercises were carried out. Cancelling such arrears was tantamount to punishing workers for the deficiencies of those in administration. ASUU rose up in protest and administration was forced to reverse the decision. But, and people found this to be very interesting, just at about the same time as he tried to step on the hard-earned arrears of promoted staff, the Vice-Chancellor awarded N2 million to himself and four other principal officers of the university as furniture grant. As at the time when he did this, there was no such thing as furniture grant in the conditions of service either of principal officers or, for that matter, the generality of the staff of the university. What used to exist and which could be considered to be close to this was furniture loan and here, the highest amount a staff could obtain was N20,000! Soon after, AbdulRaheem was to follow this up by spending close to N1 million of university funds purchasing bed spreads, dishes and cutleries for his private residence; and, soon again, another N600,000 to buy and install generator in the same residence. Meanwhile, close to N8 million had been expended refurbishing the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge but AbdulRaheem would not live there. What he did, instead, was to ask his personal assistant to move into the place!

With time, Shuaib Oba AbdulRaheem became more brazen in his disregard for university rules and regulations. He became increasingly ruthless in the way he related to staff and students in the university. A few examples will suffice. Sometime in 1999, he detected a technical problem with the documents with which Professor Tunde Oduleye, former Dean of the Faculty of Science obtained a N200,000 housing loan from the university in 1993. Without giving the man a chance to either explain himself or sort out the problem, AbdulRaheem simply issued an order for his salary to be stopped forthwith. As at this time, Oduleye had paid back to the university about half of the loan while the rest, if matters came to that, could be settled with his net pay for two months. AbdulRaheem held the man’s salary for almost 15 months, and even disobeyed a court injunction in the process.

Professor Aize Obayan, the current Vice-Chancellor of Covenant University, Ota used to be a lecturer at the University of Ilorin. She had, in fact, risen to the rank of a Reader in the Department of Guidance and Counselling by 1999. She was scheduled to return from the UK where she had spent her sabbatical in February of that year. Asked by her host Professor to stay back in Britain till the end of June when the 1998/99 session would wind up, Dr. (Mrs.) Obayan sent an application for a four-month extension of her leave to the University of Ilorin. She actually received word from a colleague in the Department to the effect that her application had been approved before she agreed to stay back. At the end of the four months, Obayan returned to the university to resume her primary assignment. Courses were allocated to her and she had settled down to teaching. She was sitting in her office one day when a messenger brought in a letter. It was from administration and what it said was to the effect that her appointment with the university had lapsed, reason being her failure to return to the university at the expiration of her sabbatical. Dr. Obayan received no query from the university. She was not put through any disciplinary process. She was not called to defend herself or explain what happened. All she got was simply a letter which terminated her appointment!

The case of Dr. Taiye Fagbemi, at the time Head of the Department of Crop Production, was even more bizarre. A former commissioner for Agriculture in Kogi State, Dr. Fagbemi had arrived in his office one morning to find a courier message waiting for him. On opening it, what Fagbemi found was a letter dismissing him from the services of the university. Later, he was to find out that the reason on which the university based its decision to send him packing was a purported indictment for corruption in Kogi State during his tenure as commissioner. The story was hardly more than mere rumour as the government of Kogi State at the time never filed an official report on Dr. Fagbemi with the university. Administration also never bothered to confront Dr. Fagbemi with the allegation, talk less of availing him an opportunity to defend himself. It simply took a decision to sack him. Dr. Fagbemi took Kogi State government to court on the matter of his indictment and won. By this time, however, he had already been relieved of his job in the university. He just had to do another legal battle with his place of primary assignment.

The final example to cite has to do with the present writer. His own ordeal began when he won the Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship, awarded by a Foundation of the same name, based in Bonn, Germany, in early 2000. The formal letter of award of the fellowship came to hand on February 7 of that year and immediately, on February 8, he forwarded a letter to the university administration, applying for a leave to utilise the award. The application was strongly supported by the Head of his Department and, also, the Dean of the Faculty. For over a month after sending the letter, no word came from the university administration. And on 13 March when it had become clear that the Appointment and Promotions Committee, the statutory body saddled with the responsibility of taking decisions on such matters, would not be able to meet before March 29, his scheduled date of departure, he forwarded another letter addressed, this time, to the Vice-Chancellor requesting for executive approval of his application for leave. Again, the letter received the express support both of the Head of Department and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Several attempts were made to see the Vice-Chancellor after submitting the application but all were in vain. Thus it happened that on March 29, 2000, his Head of Department and the Dean of the Faculty took a joint decision to release him to proceed on the fellowship, pending the time the application would be finally approved.

What administration did as soon as it learned that this writer had left the country was to order the Bursary Department to stop his salary with immediate effect. It also issued him a query dated 4 May 2000 and sent it to his Department in Ilorin, even while demonstrating in it an awareness of the fact that he was already in Germany. Thereafter, the same administration proceeded to arraign him before the Staff Disciplinary and Appeals Committee in absentia and on 19 December 2000, a letter sent via DHL by the university administration came to him in Germany, ordering him to return to his duty post in Ilorin, Nigeria, unfailingly on 21 December 2000.

On receiving this letter, he immediately wrote back to the Governing Council of the university, explaining his inability to meet the deadline since he would need time to wind up his research, notify the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that awarded him the fellowship of his intention to cut short the period of his stay, think of a proper way to evacuate his family and, perhaps most importantly, raise the fare for the flight back to Nigeria. To his dismay, the next letter he received from the university simply informed him of a summary termination of his appointment for “having failed to return to your duty post as at 21st December, 2000″.

Just as he did with staff, so AbdulRaheem also handled the students. Just two instances will suffice. First is the case of Victoria Oyalana, now deceased, whose final LL.B result was illegally withheld by the university. The lady went to court and got a judgment which ordered the university to immediately release her result and pay her, I think, N3 million as damages. The university ignored the judgment and Oyalana had to go back to court. Court bailiffs were consequently ordered to start seizing university property. Four relatively new cars were so taken, and it was only then that the university agreed to release Oyalana’s result and enter into negotiation with her on how to redeem the damages awarded her. The second is that of Tosin Akinrogunde, a medical student who was expelled from the university on flimsy charges in his final year. In his own case, Akinrogunde had to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. It was only after he got the judgment of the apex court in 2008 that the university agreed to release his MB.BS result to him. The clear implication of Akinrogunde’s ordeal is that since he was supposed to have graduated originally in 2004, his medical career has been delayed for four years!

One could go on but it is hardly necessary. The point to note is that high-handedness, abuse of due process, lack of transparency in the management of university funds and brazen application of double standards represent the core issues in the dispute which eventually ensued between the administration of Professor Shuaib Oba AbdulRaheem and the university’s chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities. For more than two years, the union made representations to the administration but the Vice-Chancellor remained unyielding. Some of the issues were also tabled before the Visitation Panel which came to the university in 1999. The white paper which government issued on the report upheld some of the complaints of the union and directed the Governing Council to call administration to order. Council felt reluctant to do this, for some strange reasons. In any case, the body which was constituted in April 2000 had also received the same complaints directly from the staff before they were presented before the Visitation Panel. It never acted on them. Frustrated, the union eventually declared a trade dispute with the university on 7 January 2001. Significantly, it called for a review of the retrenchment exercise carried out in 1999 with a view to recalling those who were wrongly retrenched, the reinstatement of those staff sacked without observing due process, a reversal of the decision to cancel promotion to certain academic cadres, and an implementation of the white paper on the visitation panel report. It gave administration and/or Council 21 days within which to either act on the issues or, preferably, call for negotiation on them. The ultimatum expired on 31 January 2001, and at a congress held the following day, the union took a decision to embark on a total strike to press home its demands.

What administration did as soon as it received notice of commencement of strike was to issue a counter notice to all academic staff, asking them to collect, fill and sign what it described as “work attendance form” and making it clear that by the completion and signing of the form, a “staff member should note that it is obligatory for him/her to ensure that he/she discharges his/her academic responsibilities including the teaching of students.” It also ordered immediate stoppage of salaries and allowances of all those who refused to fill and submit the forms. Not many people complied with the directive of administration at first. In fact, by the end of February, not more than 10 percent of the entire staff strength had complied. Given the situation, ASUU leaders were confident that administration would have no choice but to respond to its call for negotiations on the issues in dispute.

They were wrong. The national secretariat then stepped in. It sent a delegation led by Dr. Dipo Fasina, at the time the national president of the union, to the university. The delegation held meetings with the Chairman and members of the Governing Council and, as well, the Vice-Chancellor. Fasina followed this up by addressing a press conference on 15 February. He seized the opportunity of the conference to further highlight the issues involved in the crisis and the efforts made to resolve it by the union, emphasising finally the need for administration to respond positively to the union’s call for dialogue and negotiations. He ended his speech by making it clear that “if all our efforts to get the dispute… resolved peacefully and by negotiation fail, ASUU will have no choice but to do all it can to defend the UNILORIN branch.” Again, this produced no result. In fact, what administration did in response was to simply shut down the campus, declaring a mid-semester break.

By the end of March, members’ resistance had begun to weaken since they were not being paid. Indeed, by this time, the percentage of those who had returned the form had risen to about 33. Then, on 2 April, the national body of ASUU commenced a nation-wide industrial action to force government to sign the agreement it reached with the union. In ASUU, national actions are held to be of greater strategic importance than local ones. Once, therefore, a local strike gets overtaken by a nationwide industrial action, the former just has to be called off. In obedience to this policy, the Unilorin chapter of the union called a congress on 3 April and took a decision to suspend the local industrial action. Immediately after the congress, a notice of suspension of local strike was sent to administration. In it, the union made it clear that the suspension was as a result of the commencement of national strike on Monday, 2 April. Administration wrote back to the union congratulating it on its decision to suspend the local strike. It added, however, that it believed that Unilorin should not join the national strike since the university had lost a lot of time and that the salaries of any member of the branch who insisted on being part of the strike would continue to be withheld. The union replied by stating that it had no power to exempt itself from the strike, and that administration could write a letter to the National Executive Council of the union to request for exemption if it really wanted it. Administration refused to do so.

By the third week of April, the number of those who had signed back was close to 70 percent of the total number of academic staff. It was at this time that administration decided to re-open the university, fixing the date of the commencement of examination at the beginning of the month of May. It needs be stated that the local industrial action took off almost at the very start of a semester and that, as such, no real teaching had actually taken place by the time. What this meant was that the courses had to be delivered mostly within just one or two weeks. Those being handled by those who had not signed back were re-assigned either to other lecturers within the university or to those hurriedly recruited from outside; mostly from Kwara College of Education. Most of the examinations were not moderated, and, actually, some Heads of Department set questions in courses they did not teach. By the middle of May when examinations were being rounded off, only about 70 academic staff remained on strike. This was the time that the university’s Governing Council met and, based on reports from the Vice-Chancellor, took a decision to terminate the appointments of five union leaders without giving an indication of the precise offence the affected lecturers committed in the letters of sack issued to them. A further decision was taken to write letters to other academic staff who were still on strike asking them to return to work by 22 May, failing which their appointments would be terminated. Immediately on receiving the letters, a few of the affected staff immediately went and filled the return to work form. And true to the threat it issued a week earlier, on 22 May the university issued sack letters to the 44 academic staff who insisted on staying the course of the national strike.

This then is the story of Ilorin crisis. It began eight years ago and it is just beginning to get resolved following the judgment of the Supreme Court delivered on 12 June 2009, declaring the termination of the appointment of the five union leaders as null, void, and of no effect whatsoever, therefore ordering their reinstatement and the full payment of their salaries and allowances from the very day they were sacked till date. As at the time the crisis began, no one imagined that it could assume the dimension it eventually took. To be sure, the national body of the union tried all it could to get the people restored to their jobs. It devoted a lot of material and political resources as well as physical energy to the project. In the agreement which it eventually signed with government at the end of the industrial action of 2001, the union ensured the insertion of a clause stating explicitly that no members of the union would be victimised for the role they played in the strike. The implementation committee set up immediately after the agreement was signed did everything possible to get the university to respect the clause but all this was in vain. What happened instead was that the university got President Olusegun Obasanjo to give an open endorsement to the dismissals. In 2003, the union declared a nationwide strike principally because of the matter. The strike went on for over five months yet it ended without it achieving its main aim. Everybody who served as Education Minister during the period of the crisis – from Dr. Babalola Borisade through Professor Osuji and Dr. Oby Ezekwesili to Mrs. Chinwe Obaji and Dr. Igwe Aja Nwachukwu – would, on first assuming office make a pledge to resolve the matter but would end up either turning against the union or, at best, pleading frustration. Twice the cases were taken before the Industrial Arbitration Panel, IAP, by ASUU and twice it failed to get the desired award. Then what was supposed to represent a relief came on 16 July 16 2005 when Justice Peter Olayiwola who heard the cases of the two sets of dismissed staff at the Federal High Court, Ilorin, delivered judgements on the cases in which he declared the sackings illegal and ordered the university to “re-instate and/or restore the plaintiffs to their posts as lecturers in the University of Ilorin with all their rights, entitlements and other perquisites of their offices.” He further ordered the university to “pay to the plaintiffs all their salaries and allowances from February 2001 till this day of judgment and thenceforth.” Everybody was happy. The joy was to be short-lived however, as the university soon filed a notice of appeal. In the judgment subsequently delivered on the matter on 12 July 2006 at the Appeal Court holden in Ilorin, Justices Muntaka-Coomassie and Tijani Abdullahi upheld the position of the university and set aside the judgment of the Federal High Court. Justice Helen Ogunwumiju however dissented, contending that the “appeal completely lacks merit,” thus dismissing it. Of course, majority judgment often carries the day in such a situation. This, in summary, was how the cases of the 5 and 44 moved to the Supreme Court.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe the experience of suffering and humiliation which the affected lecturers experienced during the period of eight years of their wait for justice. In the first place, the reality of a loss of job is a destabilising experience in itself, especially if the responsibilities that the affected lecturers would no longer be able to discharge are taken into consideration: the responsibilities of feeding one’s families, settling school fees of children and other dependants, paying rents and other bills and generally providing for the well-being of the homes. This terrible assault on personal dignity could become completely unbearable if the indifference of some friends and colleagues together with whom one agreed to embark on the struggle is factored in, if one hears the pronouncement some of them now make, and if it is noticed that they now avoid you. One would almost run mad if you saw one, two, three of the other people who, like you, had also been relieved of their jobs go down in illness, if you saw their conditions deteriorating simply because there was no money to take care of them, and when the news reached you, finally, that they had drawn their last breaths. What cushioned this intolerable agony somehow was the strong sense of solidarity of other affected colleagues, the support received from the national body of ASUU, and the comforting remarks and occasional donations from a number of other friends, extended family members and religious groups.

In The Nation of Thursday, 18 June 2009, Professor Shuaib Oba AdulRaheem was again reported as having described the victory of the five lecturers in the Supreme Court as “dubious”. Speaking further, AbdulRaheem added that the “judgment did not absolve the persons concerned of wrong doing”, that it was “not based on whether or not an offence was committed, but only on the procedures adopted by the authorities in meting out punishment”. In making this statement, it would seem that Professor AbdulRaheem has forgotten a number of things. In the first place, the letter of “Cessation of Appointment” issued to the now victorious lecturers when they were being relieved of their jobs in 2001, and as earlier stated, did not contain any indication of the reason why the university took a decision to terminate their appointments. Second is the fact that in the amended statement of defence filed in the Federal High Court, Ilorin, the university itself had averred that the affected lecturers’ appointments were terminated only in accordance with the provisions in the Memorandum of Appointment, and not because they committed any offence. Three, and this is very important, it is in the records of the court that Dr. Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, speaking for himself and the other four lecturers, “denied that they ever disrupted examination in the University of Ilorin.” At no point throughout the eight long years of adjudication did the university ever counter this. Actually, what Mr. Maruf Eya Ogbonya, an Executive Officer in the Governing Council office who bore witness on behalf of the university did was to corroborate Oloruntoba-Oju’s position by stating that “the plaintiffs’ appointment (sic) were terminated in accordance with the Memo of Appointment and not on alleged disruption of examination in one hall…” The point being made, in other words, is that the question of the Supreme Court absolving the affected lecturers of “wrong doing” did not arise because the university had itself made it clear that they committed no offence. But for the minutes of the meeting of the Governing Council held on 15 May, it would have been very difficult to know the story presented by administration to get the Governing Council to consent to terminating the appointments of the five lecturers!

Even then, it is still not correct to assert that what the Supreme Court did was to quarrel with the “procedures adopted by authorities in meting out punishment”. What the justices of the apex court who sat on that case said was that Council did not bother to establish that the affected lecturers were indeed guilty of the allegations leveled against them before taking a decision to punish them. That step which the university failed to take before issuing out sack letters is very important: the question is how do we know that the affected lecturers actually committed the offence that they had been accused of? Why didn’t the university allow them an opportunity to defend themselves? Why did it just go ahead to summarily terminate their appointments? It is trite knowledge anyway that an accused person remains innocent until the case against him/her has been proved. No law – religious, secular or traditional – permits those in authority to pass judgment on people without first giving them a chance to defend themselves and the Yoruba actually have a somewhat unpalatable name for whosoever it might be who decides a case based on a story presented by just one side in a dispute.

It is probably more important to return now to Ishaq Oloyede, the current Vice-Chancellor of the university. The man has a tough job on his hands. Will he be able to live up to the occasion? Will he realise that this is a sober moment for the institution he presides over? Will he himself remember the injunction he issued to me in 1996: whenever you quarrel with another person or other people, always remember that there is always the day after.

 

 

– Dr. Raji is Associate Professor in the Department of Drama, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.

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