Crisis in Federal Tech College: Take Decisive Action Now, CSOs Urge FG
CHIGOZIE AMADI
As the crisis rocking the Federal College of Education, Yaba, threatens to snowball into a national emergency, the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership, CACOL, have called on the Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman, to urgently and decisively address the lingering crisis rocking the Federal College of Education, Technical (FCET), Akoka, Lagos.
The group said that they are aware that some disgruntled workers of the college allegedly locked up their provost’s office and issued him a quit notice from his official residence, saying such action by a few members of the Senior Staff Union of Colleges of Education (SSUCOEN), could lead to violent reactions, the end of which cannot be fathomed.
They said that the grievance of the protesters who are insisting that with the amendment of the Educational Colleges Act 2023, which introduced a five-year single term of office for provosts and other principal officers of the colleges, the tenure of Dr. Wahab Azeez had ended on 26 May, 2024.
However, the provost asserted that he was appointed for the first term of
four years in 2019 and that having been duly reappointed by the
institution’s governing council in 2023, he already resumed his second
term in office on 27 May 2023 before the amended act was signed into law on June 12, 2023.
But both CDHR and CACOL in a statement signed by Debo Adeniran stated that following letters by the unions seeking clarification on the tenure of office of the provost based on the amended act, the Minister wrote the unions in May, affirming the legality of Dr. Azeez’s second term of four years.
The statement read in part: “However, the protesters ignored the minister’s verdict and stubbornly continued to stage unjustified daily protests on the campus, denying management members access to their offices.
“It was reported by some sections of the media that the minister had invited the provost and the warring factions, especially the leaders of staff unions on the campus, to a reconciliation meeting scheduled to hold at the ministry’s headquarters in Abuja.
“The Minister of State for Education, Yusuf Sununu, represented Mr. Mamman chaired the meeting. Other ministry officials at the meeting included the Directors of Special Duties and his counterpart in the Department of Colleges of Education, Zubairu Abdullahi and Uchenna Uba, respectively.”
Adeniran stressed that the Chairman of the newly inaugurated governing
council of the college, Olatunde Adenuga; Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE), Paulinus Okwelle; Chairman of the Committee of Provosts of Colleges of Education, Faruk Haruna and among others, were also at the meeting which was attended by representatives of all unions in the college, yet it made no headway.
It was also reported that the resolution reached at the meeting among others stated that: “The Provost should be allowed to operate under the supervision of the Chairman of the Governing Council of the College whilst all staff cease to protest forthwith.”
But civil society group lamented that the they “are however surprised that the Minister of Education did not make further enquiry about the outcome of his intervention in the matter which is still lingering and jeopardizing the academic activities of the students and thereby denying them the benefits of full-fledged tutelage that they deserve from the college.
“We are worried that if the crisis lingers further than it presently is, and the provost is not allowed to perform his official duties optimally, it is the tax payers’ money that is being wasted since both the provost and the staff that are spearheading the crisis will still be entitled to their salaries and allowances.
“This is even when the aggrieved staff were only representing personal interests as they are not in any way duty bound to do what they are doing that’s disrupting academic and other activities of the College against the advice of the Ministry of Education and other legal authorities.
“We do not expect the minister to allow his wise counsel to be thrown overboard just as the security agencies are not expected to allow such illegality to continue unchecked, especially when the ministry, backed by extant legal instruments, has confirmed it that the provost still has a term of office to execute.
“It is against this backdrop that we caution that the security agencies would not claim that they do not know what has been going on in that college for some time now and we would like to use this medium to call on them not to allow the skirmish degenerate into full blown violence which may lead to bodily harm, loss of limbs or even lives before they react to douse the attendant damages to lives and public property.
“We therefore hereby advise that they should not facilitate any further disruption of academic and administrative activities and put machinery in motion to restore peace on the college campus forthwith.
“Finally, we would like to urgently call on the Minister of Education to swiftly intervene in the crisis rocking the institution which has already affected academic and administrative activities on the campus.
“The minister should realize that it will be a negative advertisement and record as well as a stain on his CV if he fails to resolve the dispute immediately.
“He should brace himself up, put all arsenals in place to call all warring factions to order and iron out grey areas that all parties would agree on as the opposite will be an ill-wind that blows no one any good.”
