A Civil Society Organisation, the Society for Rule of Law in Nigeria (SRLN), has called on the National Universities Commission (NUC) to revisit the accreditation of courses in the Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti done in 2016, owing to the sack of the staff recruited by the university to facilitate accreditation of the courses.
Over 1,000 workers of the university were sacked last year in an exercise seen as political victimization as the sacked workers were not employed by the present government of Dr. Kayode Fayemi. The government had earlier sacked over 2,000 public servants, including primary and secondary school teachers employed in 2018 by the Ayo Fayose administration.
According to a statement on Friday, by its Co-coordinator, Dr. Chima Ubeku, the SRLN said it amounted to “obtaining by fraud for a citadel of higher education to recruit staff to meet NUC requirements for accreditation of its courses and later sack the staff after getting the accreditation and the NUC must not allow this seeming academic fraud to stand.”
The group said, from its findings, departments like; Science Laboratory Technology (SLT), Tourism, CRS Education, French Education, History Education Engineering, Science Education, Mathematics Education, Integrated Science Education, Biology Education, Social Science Education and others were accredited by the NUC in April 2016.
The SRLN said since the Ekiti State University had by itself admitted that the staff used for accreditation of its courses in 2016 were illegally employed, the accreditation cannot stand because “illegal staff cannot be used to get legal accreditation.”
“The NUC must not allow Ekiti State University to benefit from the efforts of workers whose employment it had admitted to be irregular,” the group added.
Decrying the shortage of lecturers in the university owing to the sack, SRLN said; “As at today, there is no single lecturer at the History and International Studies Education, Tourism and SLT Departments and we wonder how a university can run without lecturers. Also, what will now happen to all the courses handled by the sacked lecturers?”
While describing the workers sack as wicked and inhuman, the SRLN said it was appalling that under Fayemi, who rose to political prominence, using the ladder of human rights and pro-democracy activism, over 3,000 Ekiti indigenes have lost the jobs that they got under a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government.
The group said it was strange that a government of All Progressives Congress (APC), a party that claimed to be progressives is the one sending people employed by a PDP government back to the labour market and we wonder if Dr. Fayemi is aware that power is transient and that whatever he does today will be history tomorrow.
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