Still on sex for favours

LAST week, some lecturers at the University of Lagos and the University of Legon, Ghana, got embroiled in sex for favour scandals. They were exposed through the undercover operations of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reporter, Kiki Mordi. Last year, a lecturer at the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Professor Richard Akindele, was similarly brought into disrepute through the instrumentality of his unguarded loins. He was caught on tape demanding sex from a female postgraduate student, Monica Osagie. Akindele is currently serving jail time after having been relieved of his appointment by the university.

Both Boniface Igbeneghu and Samuel Oladipo of the Arts and Social Sciences faculties of the University of Lagos respectively, were exposed by the BBC’s undercover reporter while undertaking prurient negotiations that were quite unbecoming of university teachers. The exposure showed the depth of the perversion in the country. Apparently, there is an entrenched behavioural disorder at the University of Lagos where academic staff operate a “cold room” within the precincts of the staff club. This cold room, according to Dr. Igbeneghu, is the venue for the perpetration of odious perversions where the lecturers engage in sexual orgies with their vulnerable victims. Not even the young girls still seeking admission into the university are safe from their lecherous, predatory grip.

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The University of Lagos has announced that the current cases of sex for favours will be thoroughly investigated and deservedly sanctioned. That is obviously the right direction to go. Indeed, it is important to reduce this menace to the barest minimum in all of the country’s institutions of learning. When lecturers insist on sexual gratification, they unleash unfit intellectual products on the society. This must certainly be seen as polluting the system; it amounts to poisoning the entire human resources and capacity development system in the country.  This is, to say the least, a very dangerous trend. The consequences of graduating unfit students in professions like medicine and engineering, as indeed every other field, are too dreadful to contemplate. Sadly, these consequences are already being visited on the country.

To be sure, both the lecherous, predatory lecturers and the weak and lazy students who earn good grades through unwholesome means constitute a danger to the society. There is absolutely no reason why the whole country must continue to bear the brunt of some unscrupulous individuals’ indiscretion. The perpetrators of these behavioural disorders in the country’s institutions of learning have to be heavily sanctioned, and so should those who are involved in this malaise in the workplace. All acts of distortion of the reward system in the society must be dealt with decisively to prevent their spread.

The fact that the menace of sex for favours is a universal trend doesn’t recommend it for Nigeria that is still battling with the challenge of human resources development. A situation that will definitely cast aspersions on the quality of the products of the intellectual industry in this country must be staved off by the authorities. Developed countries might be able to get by with the menace, but countries like Nigeria will only be brought down to their knees. It is crucial for the authorities to rein in those who are involved in the shameful deeds. They must be stopped before it is too late.