Although the Nigerian authorities and especially the University of Lagos was forced to act because of the publicity generated by the recent British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) sex for grade documentary, the reality is that the Nigerian university environment encourages and is quite tolerant of sexual assault and rape of female students especially.
Beyond the mere tokenism of punishing the two lecturers captured in the documentary, the authorities must be forced to implement sweeping reforms of the university environment by outlawing any form of emotional relationship between teachers and students, putting structures in place to make academics account for the awesome powers they enjoy over students.
In 2012, a pilot ICPC/NUC University System Study and Review (USSR) of corruption in the university system was undertaken and the review identified a series of infractions including admissions racketeering, misapplication and embezzlement of funds, sale of examination questions, inducement to manipulate awards of degrees, direct cheating during examinations, deliberate delays in the release of results, victimisation of students by officials, lack of commitment to work by lecturers, and above all, sexual harassment and exploitation of students by lecturers.
At the presentation of the report in 2012, the ICPC Chairman, Ekpo Nta, was quoted as saying, “we have uncovered many corrupt practices in our universities. Sexual harassment seems to rank extremely very high among corrupt practices in our universities. Our report is based on the quantum of petitions we have received on this corrupt practice. We’re emphasising this because sexual harassment has to do with the immediate challenge we need to address.”
In fact, the rampant cases of reported cases of sexual harassment in our tertiary institution forced the senate in 2016, to propose a bill, known as the Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education Institution Bill, which prescribes a 5 year jail term for lecturers and educators convicted of sexual harassment of either their male or female students and also ban lecturer-student relationships altogether.
According to the sponsor of the bill, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, explained that “Indeed there is no family in Nigeria where you don’t find a victim of sexual harassment…It is either your wife when she was younger or your daughter, your sister or even a niece who has gone through the tertiary education system at one point or the other…You will find out that they have had this brush with these lecturers who continue to see these young women as perquisite of their office as lecturers. We feel that is unacceptable. We have to put a stop to it.”
However, despite the novelty of this bill, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), vehemently opposed the bill and successfully lobbied for the bill to be dropped. The reason the union gave then for opposing the bill was that it was discriminatory because its targeted educators. They rather proposed legislation on dress code – the usual alibi used to justify rape and sexual harassment.
At a time when progressive universities are outlawing any form of sexual or romantic relationships between students and teachers, our universities are being turned to centres of sexual harassment, rape and transactional sex. How can any meaningful knowledge be learnt and transmitted in such an environment? It is not surprising therefore that our universities are bereft of any serious academic endeavours and our so-called academics are lost in the conversations within their disciplines and have resorted to conversing among themselves in beer parlours and “giving tutorials” to ladies in university “cold rooms”.
This, to us, is one of the major problems in our universities and not just underfunding because even when the universities are properly funded, we will be faced with a bigger problem – total lack of academics worth their salt but only sexual predators, corrupt lay-about pretending to be academics. Clearly the universities and ASUU cannot be relied upon to undertake these reforms. It has to be foisted on them – and that is where the government and ministry of education must show leadership.
