By Toye Olorode
I read the Inaugural Speech of the new Registrar of JAMB posted on AKADA DEVELOPMENT recently. I noted, especially Oloyede’s sermon on discipline and “indiscipline” and “law and order”! I’m sure all lovers of “law-and-order”, especially facials, will be impressed. And all those students and lecturers who suffered untold repression for a full decade, at University of Ilorin will be wondering! We can’t overemphasize the tragedy and agony of the relatives and dependents of the lecturers who lost their lives under the continuing reign of impunity at Unilorin.
Oloyede’s sermon on corruption is also instructive! The Unilorin Governing Council and the administration of Shuaib Oba Abdulraheem on whose shoulder he claimed to have perched to continue the Unilorin tradition of impunity, was indicted in the White Paper of a 2001 Visitation Report to have misappropriated Unilorin funds!
OBJ consequently dissolved the Unilorin Governing Council and left the VC, the Unilorin “Chief Executive” to continue impunity! OBJ himself went around fabricating stories as to why our colleagues were sacked at Unilorin!
When Peter Okebukola referred to Oloyede as a “no-nonsense” person, Okebukola was underscoring the virility and virulence of an NUC confraternity. Okebukola was NUC ES when Unilorin administration dug in to humiliate the Unilorin 49; one of his first official visits to any university was to Unilorin where a disgusting photo op showed the Unilorin VC presenting a gift to the brand new NUC ES!
For almost two decades now that the Nigerian University System had been under neo-liberal siege spearheaded by the World Bank and Nigeria’s ruling class, the NUC had been the superintending organ! Under Okojie, the NUC took a paid ad to justify the oppression, intimidation and vicarious murder of our colleagues at Unilorin. It took the Supreme Court of Nigeria to set the records of impunity at Unilorin straight.
When a Commission like NUC was accused of giving money to a Federal Minister to bribe Federal legislators and nothing happened, we can understand why Oloyede, an academic, will be reading riot act to workers about “insubordination”!
It is always important that we remember; that’s what Comrades Eskor Toyo, Mahmoud Tukur and Festus Iyayi kept telling us.
Long live Nigeria’s Working People!
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