Way back in 2007, Idris Abdulkareem, in his musical hey days, set the charts blazing with the number; ‘Mr. Lecturer’, — the ribaldry of the scholarly mentor that turned the female student under his care into some sexual fringe benefit. Abdulkareem’s notes may have only made meaning to those acquainted with daily happenings, as it relates to female students’ ordeal in the hands of lecturers in Nigeria’s ivory towers.
As entertaining though as the lyrics and tune appeared, I could still flip back to the old English era of Geoffrey Chaucer, en route to Canterbury, in Chaucer’s Prologue to Canterbury Tales. In what looked like a distant rebuke of the upright but humble pastor at some rural parish of his days in Catholic England, the litrary guru posed a golden query:” if gold rusts, what would iron do?”
Through the electronics and print, both Idris and Chaucer just re-echoed, by way of official documentation, the untold stories of female undergraduates of tertiary academic institutions. Now, the stunning documentary of the recent ‘BBC Sting Reportage’, has stung everyone into new restlessness over the loud silence on sex-for-mark scandals in our universities and other tertiary institutions.
This commendable journalistic endeavour, effectively beams light on a hidden menace. It reaffirms the fact that the condemnable practice has been around for ages and is more wide-spread and reckless as most care to admit. Unfortunately, it is being protected by conspiratorial silence and institutional conspiracy to protect the culprits on sickly peer esprit de corps.
The height of it is that lecturers now order their victims to book and pay for hotel space for their sexual excapade or fail them if they refused.
From the days of Chaucer in his Cantebury Tales, down to the era of Idris’ musical adventures, the public had been hearing and reading the absurd details of what could best be described as an academic injustice to a folk. The BBC Africa Eye’s lens has merely established a proof that the worrying sexual harassment (or sex- for-marks) of female students by male lecturers is a thriving but damaging practice in tertiary institutions across the nation. It is surely not a pretty one!
Like every research work that needs a sample to be able to draw a conclusion on its population, the two universities so highlighted, though not a good one for the image of their institutions, merely represent the entire tertiary institutions while the concerned lecturers represent their cohorts in the trade across universities.
While the Chaucers may have raised their pens, and the Abdulkareems, their voices, against this injustice without any remarkable attention drawn to their complaints, the finished work of the BBC Africa Eye team leaves the government and the general public inexcusable, should they fail to stem the tide at this critical moment.
The truth is that it is about time to redeem the female folk from the evil claws of the male lecturers who had considered them as their fringe benefits and had preyed on them all this while. That singular but bold act of reportage, as presented by the BBC team, is a reminder to perpetrators of the said evil and the likes, in our academic institutions as a whole, that the days of ‘business as usual’ as regards sexual harassment of female students, is over.
With sexual perverts — preying on students under their care, one wonders where lies the place of the maxim of loco parentis that automatically makes every educator a parent to students under his care. It is for this reason that the Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, said “the unique student-educator relationship of authority, dependency and trust should never be violated”.
Sexual abuse of female tertiary students must be frontally attacked and stamped out. Universities should be centres of academic excellence, not bastions of sexual perverts.”They owe a special fiduciary duty of care to students under their authority – students who trust and depend on them to shape their future career paths. It must therefore be extremely offensive to a reasonable mind where an educator treats students as ‘perquisites’ of his office,” Orno-Agege insisted.
While the act remains a shame on our conscience as a people, the need to stop it has become imperative. Thus, the sexually harassed must see the window provided by this journalistic feat as a wake – up call to speak out in the event of future harassment. Actor Mhairi Morrison acknowledged this in his reaction to Sadie Jemmett’s album, “Don’t Silence Me”, a music video aimed to be anthem for survivors of sexual assault.
“My hope is for my four-year-old niece to grow up into a world where if something bad ever happened she would know that she has a voice and would not be afraid to use it,” Morrison said.
The writer, therefore, is of the view that Senator Ovie Omo-Agege’s call to parents and youth to support enactment of effective law against sexual harassment in work places and educational institutions is even more apt now than ever. Hence, there is no need postponing till the evening, what the morning can achieve.

Sylvia ThankGod-Amadi