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OPINION: Desperate Crowds And Foods Of Death [Monday Lines]

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By Lasisi Olagunju

I died one bright day in 1969 – yes, died; crushed by a motorcyclist. It happened on Ileya Day (Eid el Kabir) in my hometown. I did not know, and still do not know, how it happened. All I know is that I was following my father to the eid praying ground in the morning, then I followed a crowd of other children to cross the road to the other side,…then I woke up in the afternoon, medics all over me, stitching and cleaning. Where I was turned out to be the Baptist Welfare Centre in neighbouring Iree town. A day that was supposed to be a day of feast almost turned grim in our home. For parents of the children who died last Wednesday in Ibadan, and families who lost loved ones on Saturday in Abuja and Okija, Anambra State, this Christmas and the New Year are certain days of mourning. May God comfort them.

The dead got eaten while looking for what to eat. I pray that the bereaved be healed of their mortal wounds. They do not have my parents’ luck: I came back from the dead, head heavily sutured. The children who went to Basorun in Ibadan on Wednesday last week didn’t come back; they won’t be back, forever. Every eid el Kabir reminds me of my own aborted (abortive) death. For the Ibadan, Abuja and Okija families, every year end henceforth will come with spectral, ghostly memories. What happened is an evergreen tragedy, monumental in all ways.

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When a similar crowd crush killed 183 children in a hall in Sunderland, United Kingdom, on 16 June, 1883, one of the survivors contrasted the mood in his family with the atmosphere in unfortunate homes in that city: “In our house there was joy and thanksgiving, and one old neighbour laid his hand on my head and told me that my death had not yet been decreed. But in many homes, there was misery and desolation, many a heart was stricken with woe, and many a mother as she bent in sorrow over a loved one so strangely still (said that) indeed, the ways of God are not as our ways.” William Codling, who managed to escape the horrid incident with his sister, wrote the above in December 1894 (eleven years after the tragedy).

Death existed to kill the aged, but today, it is murdering the young, north, east and west. Why? Fuji music philosopher, Saheed Osupa, asks the same question in a song: “Ikú np’àgbà/ èwo ni t’omodé?/ Ilé ayé mà wá di rúdurùdu.” The world is spoilt. In his ‘Yoruba Responses to The Fear of Death’ (1960), Peter Morton-Williams describes death of the young among the Yoruba as “horrifying, an unnatural calamity.” It is true that what we call àìgboràn- headstrong foolhardiness – sometimes kills, but it is also true that the will of the enemy kills more. The enemy in the context of this death discourse is the Nigerian state. Mass misery was the enemy that processed the disasters of last week.

Hunger is a very jealous tenant; it habours no neighbour – not the fear of death, not of death itself. If the hungry feared death, they would know that an uncontrolled crowd is a barrel bomb that kills without borders. Hunger was the devil in the fatal gatherings of Ibadan, Abuja and Okija. I blame the lords of the land. On their watch, everyone begs, or rummages the trash can or joins deadly food rallies for IDP rations. Those are the options. The other available option is suicide – and many pursue life today in ways that suggest they do not mind dying as an escape route.

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MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Tinubu, Atiku And The Lion’s Share [Monday Lines 2]

In 1883, what was promised the kids of Sunderland were toys and “the greatest treat for children ever given.” In Ibadan last Wednesday, what the children were promised was N5,000 for the first 5,000 of them that showed up. Some mothers heard that and put one plus one together: Two kids meant N10,000; three kids, N15,000. They did the maths and thought it was right to gather and rush their entire kids into that ground of death in search of hope. Many got there as early as 5am – five hours before the event was due to start; some mothers reportedly even slept overnight there with their kids to beat the queue. Some more desperate ones threw their kids across the fence into the already choked and charged school compound, the event venue. It was like feeding their future to the demon of misery. Mr. Oriyomi Hamzat, whose Agidigbo FM radio station partnered with the organizers, says in a trending audio clip: “I saw how people were falling on one another. As I was rescuing those that fell, more people were rushing and stepping on those that were on the ground because of small gifts. I pity that woman, and I pity myself. I will never do this again.”

In Okija, Anambra State, the promise was rice; in Abuja, it was imprecise ‘palliative.’ The Ibadan, Abuja and Okija gesture of magnanimity unfortunately turned to foods of death; a pledged gift of chickens took whole bulls from many families. In ‘The Gift, and Death, of Blackness,’ Joseph Winters of Duke University, North Carolina, United States, writes about what he calls “the gift of death.” Some gifts become poisonous when wrongly given; they kill. We have become so depraved that we volubly advertise philanthropy. Gordon B. Hancock, in a June 1926 Social Forces article, writes on “the evils which inhere in excessive advertising.” He asks one troubling question: “Is the unlimited sway of advertising compatible with society’s highest good?” Whoever is probing last week’s serial disasters should seek an answer to that question. An effusive promise of gifts on a popular radio station roused several thousands of hungry children and adults to the Ibadan funfair of death. Similarly hyped promises of gifts poured over two thousand school children into Victoria Hall in Sunderland in 1883 – 141 years ago. William Codling, who was quoted above, narrated how the Sunderland disaster happened: “It began something in this wise: A man delivered a handful of bills outside the school doors on the Friday night setting forth the entertainment in glowing terms and we were all wild to go.” And they went. As it turned out, no one left that venue, and all the Nigerian venues of last week, with what was promised. Instead, death, which was not promised, was the harvest. In the UK experience, a whole class of 30 Sunday School children were among those picked up dead from the stampede. In Ibadan, some mothers reportedly lost all they had to the tragedy.

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Hunger, or even fear of hunger, push people to plunge into deadly irrationality. On Thursday, 24 October, 1918, eleven women, four children and a police officer died in a stampede at a market in Cairo, Egypt, simply because they feared they wouldn’t get enough cereals to buy. They were not looking for freebies; they died because they scrambled to buy what was scarce.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: ‘An Enemy Of The People’ [Monday Lines]

“In the aftermath of tragedies,” writes Ellen Walker in a November, 2022 article, “it’s easy to focus on the assignation of blame. But how well do we understand the causes of crushing crowds?” The piece is on ‘Death by Crowding.’ All probes and available literature on crowd accidents abroad blame the same issues: poor and “inadequate planning, excited crowd, lack of crowd management and a flaw or hazard in a facility” (J. F. Dickie, 1995: 318). We have those factors here compounded viciously by unremitting hunger courtesy of bumbling governance, and a colada of existential concerns.

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Grim and tragic as last week was, will it be the last? We pray it is so, but it may not be unless we check the causes and yank off the throttle, drivers of such tragedies. In ‘The Life of Reason’, Spanish American philosopher, George Santayana, warns that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A passage in J. F. Dickie’s ‘Major Crowd Catastrophes’ published in 1995 suggests exactly that. Dickie writes about the Sunderland disaster of 1883 with 183 fatalities, the London crowd crush of 1943 with 173 fatalities; Bolton of 1946 with 33 fatalities; Glasgow of 1971 with 66 fatalities and Sheffield of 1989 with 96 fatalities. He then sculptures those crowd-crushing disasters into a dizzying revolving door of calamities. Because man does not learn from his bad experiences, they come in repeated times like Wole Soyinka’s Abiku. Dickie notes that “the Ibrox stand incident of 1902 in Glasgow reoccurred at Bastia in 1992 where the potential for an enormous tragedy existed. The crushing accident at Bolton in 1946 has a striking similarity with the Hillsborough disaster. The Sunderland catastrophe of 1883 is similar to the Bethnal Green incident of 1943 which repeated itself on a smaller scale in New York in 1992.”

We have them in Nigeria here too. I quote a BBC report of the Ibadan stampede and its predecessors: “Nigeria is grappling with its worst economic crisis in a generation, which explains why more than 10,000 people reportedly turned up for the event. There have been several similar incidents this year. In March, two female students were crushed to death at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, near the capital Abuja, when a rice distribution programme by the state governor caused a crowd surge. At least 23 people were injured. Three days later in the northern state of Bauchi, at least seven people died in another crush when a philanthropist and businessman was giving handouts of 5,000 naira. Earlier in February, five people were reported killed in Lagos when the Nigerian Customs Service auctioned seized bags of rice. A crowd surge for bags of rice being auctioned for about $7:00 led to the trampling to death of five people with dozens more injured.” The BBC did that recap on Wednesday, four days before the twin tragedies in Abuja in the north and Okija in the east – a perfect completion of the usual pan-Nigerian triangle of evil.

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I spend some of my valuable time watching power and its drama. This past week, I bit my lips watching the indiscretion of the president’s men organizing a voluptuous boat regatta for him in Lagos in spite of the Ibadan disaster. I shook my head at the politics of a last-minute cancellation of that boat regatta not because of Ibadan but because of similar disasters in the north and in the east. The president and his Lagos men were almost echoing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “What touches us ourselves shall be last served.”

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Of Kings, King Kong And Honour

The president has been busy with statements after statements mourning the dead. He needs to do more than issuing condolence messages. PR stunts of cancellation of a boat regatta won’t turn back hungry crowds from journeys of death. The president should convince himself that his policies are not life-friendly; they kill the poor and impoverish the rich. I hope he knows this and believes this and makes amends. He is his number one problem; the second are those who sing Emperor Nero’s anthem while his Rome burns. Fawning fans of power will insist that the president and his policies have clean hands in this mass death matter. They will talk of palliatives of the past as proof of the president’s humanity. Unfortunately, as Zimbabweans say, “you cannot tell a hungry child that you gave him food yesterday.”

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Defenders of power would point at pre-May 2023 crowd-crush disasters in this country. They would say they happened before this regime; they would cite the several deadly stampedes outside Nigeria across decades and centuries. The Muslim among them would cite Quran 63:11: “Never will Allah delay a soul when its time has come.” The Christian among them would quote the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Yes, a stampede in a Chicago theatre in 1903 killed 602; another in a Moscow stadium in 1982 killed 340. A stampede in Mecca in 1990 killed 1,425; many more follow-up crowd crush disasters in Saudi Arabia claimed hundreds of lives. Further down history in 1863, a Church stampede in Santiago, Chile, killed 2,000 persons. Regime backers here will use these figures to scent the arse of their palace. They won’t think of one distinguishing fact: in all those places, the disasters were not because the people were starving and dying. Even the Egypt food scarcity that birthed the disaster of 1918 was not because government was unfeeling; it was because a world war was ongoing. Here, there is no war, yet people are dying in droves as if there is a war here.

Kings and presidents should pause their greed, rethink their policies and create some space for the people. They can remain big without being “superfluous and lust-dieted.” They can let “distribution undo excess” so that “each man (will) have enough.” The words in quote here are from Shakespeare’s King Lear. And, ‘enough’ in every culture here means life’s basics: food, shelter, clothing and hope of advancement. It is only when the “houseless heads and unfed sides”, when the “poor naked wretches” are weaned of their want that the country can have peace and stop crying over spilt milk of fatal stampedes. In whatever remedial steps we may take, I see a need for urgency. We need to act fast, otherwise – and this is my conclusion here – the next stampede may not spare the elite.

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OPINION Generals, Marabouts And Boko Haram

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By Lasisi Olagunju

General Lucky Irabor wrote a book that attracted a gathering of Generals in Abuja last Friday. Irabor, in the book, describes the January 1966 coup as “a shield that became a sword;” a solution that became a problem. He may be right. Bishop Matthew Kukah, who reviewed the book, described the January 1966 coup as the nation’s primary crime scene. I disagree. Nigeria’s real crime scene is located far before 1966. We still have not learnt any lesson.

General Irabor is the immediate past Chief of the Defence Staff. Born 5 October, 1965, he was a baby – three months, ten days old – when January 1966 happened to Nigeria. General Olusegun Obasanjo wrote the Foreword to the book and chaired the Abuja gathering. I have not seen what he wrote in the Foreword but I heard what he said at the book launch. He said Boko Haram was not about politics and not really about religion. So what is it about? He suggested that frustration and lack of “better life” perverted the pervert. He then wondered why terror and terrorism have become Nigeria’s way of life.

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There were other Generals there. One of them is the Sultan of Sokoto; he belonged in the Armoured Corps. Another is the Etsu Nupe. Both of them left the army as Brigadier-General. The Sultan said Generals don’t retire. And because they do not retire or get tired, we keep seeing them in our lives beyond the barracks. Irabor’s book launch turned out to be a confab of Generals in search of what eludes them on the battlefield – victory over the collective enemy.

They were there looking for a solution to Nigeria’s interminable terrorism. I watched them and reached for 16th century English statesman, scholar and saint, Sir Thomas More. In his ‘A Dialogue Concerning Heresies’, More wrote a line which became the idiom: “looking for a needle in a haystack.” Our Generals need to interrogate that English clause locked in seven words of frustration. It speaks to their gathering. What they seek they won’t find except they really want to see it.

Irabor’s book carries the title: ‘Scars’ in bold, capital letters of blood. Beyond quotes from the review, I have not seen the book to get what his ‘SCARS’ really talks about. But ‘scars’ as book or as sabre cuts on the face cannot be anyone’s sweet story.

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Bishop Kukah, the book reviewer, said Irabor’s story is about Nigeria’s scars of insecurity; the ugly, unhealed, unhealable wound gashed on our collective face by Boko Haram. President Goodluck Jonathan was there with the Generals; and he got the metaphor right. He said the abduction of Chibok Girls is an everlasting scar on the face of his presidency; he hinted that it was a monument to leadership failure. But is Jonathan the only one with that scar?

Nineteenth century Scottish novelist and essayist, Robert Louis Stevenson (R. L. Stevenson) wrote ‘Treasure Island’, an excellent novel of pirates and blood, hidden treasure chests, death and disappointments. It was published in 1883. If you read more of Stevenson beyond his popular fiction, you would likely come across where he wrote the truth that our “wealth took their value from our neighbour’s poverty.” You would read how this someone who lived and died 131 years ago saw that despite the “free man’s” pretence to kindness, “the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently entreated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.” The passage reads like it is about 2025 Nigeria and its unfed, unclaimed, unclad, untaught children.

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I watched the cream of Nigerian Generals, serving and retired, on Friday at that book launch of one of them. I watched them pontificating, one by one, on TV about Nigeria and its scars and I remembered Major-General Sir Thomas Vandeleur in R. L. Stevenson’s ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’, a story in his ‘New Arabian Nights’ published in 1881. Thomas Vandeleur is a General in blind, desperate but fruitless search for his family’s lost jewel. Nigeria’s Generals, like Vandeleur, old adventurers in uniform who once held the diamond of power, have ruled and been ruined by it. The nation’s story, like Vandeleur’s, is one of obsession with that fatal jewel called authority, which brings suffering to all who covet it.

Our Generals are helpless. That is what I saw at that event on Friday. Power has cast Nigeria’s fortunes into the river of defeat; it has left generations searching the muddy depths for the nation’s lost promise. Dethroned by coups and transitions, Nigeria’s power elite always come back as “handsome tobacconists” of democracy, reinvented messiahs and born-again democrats. They trade in influence and illusion; their scars, like Stevenson’s Vandeleur’s, are the marks of past violence disguised as experience, and their continued grip on Nigeria’s destiny shows that, though the diamond of nationhood is lost, its curse endures.

When I get General Irabor’s book to read, I will search for words that define wounds inflicted by bad and absent leadership, by aborted dreams and betrayed hopes. I will look for phrases, for sentences and paragraphs on heists that cut deeper into the nation’s face. I will love to read through its jagged pages of dreams deferred.

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I scanned the Generals’ faces and read their lips. The gashes of insecurity, from Boko Haram’s bombs in Borno to herders’ bullets in Kwara, are the handiwork of decades of neglect and decay. The scar of insecurity has become our national birthmark, neither healed nor hidden; its permanence mocks every promise of reform. Obasanjo said at the book event that “Boko Haram is now virtually becoming part of our life. Should we accept that? If we should not accept it, what should we do? How much do we know? Even from the other side, and from this side, have we been active enough? Have we been proactive enough?” If a General and former president asked us those questions, to whom should we then turn for answers? Like Vandeleur’s scar, Nigeria’s wounds carry an ambiguity; they are signs of survival, yet also of complicity, for we are all, in one way or another, marked by a bad story we refuse to rewrite. General Irabor has done very well by writing a book that has provoked a discourse. We wait for others.

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The Generals who spoke were very eloquent on the scars of Boko Haram. Did I not hear excuses for what the terrorists do and why they do them? One of the Generals even said “they (Boko Haram) never said book is haram.” Valuable minutes were spent doing definition of terms. Is that also a solution to the problem? They said so much but I didn’t hear a word from the Generals on the millions of out-of-school children who feed the machinery of terrorism and banditry. Today, Nigeria has an estimated 20 million out-of-school children, the highest number in the world. Read United Nations’ records: More than 60 percent of these children are in the northern states; they are the almajiri; the system is there till tomorrow; entrenched.

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Was it not General Obasanjo who wrote in one of his books that “our fingers will not be dry of blood” as long as lice abound in our clothes? I agree with him.
Because we are a dirty, contaminated nation, lice keep laying their nits in the seams of our garments. The line of Boko Haram lice is lengthened daily by mass child illiteracy and adult disillusionment. Our Generals would not acknowledge that the poverty of our streets is both symptom and scar: proof of the violence of neglect and the betrayal of the future. They, and we, still do not see that in every Almajiri begging for miserable morsels of leftovers, the nation’s unhealed wounds find new violence and new weapons.

Then, there is Bishop Kukah’s jarring charge that marabouts have become a substitute for government and governing. He hinted that we’ve outsourced the leadership of the nation to some “blind clerics” somewhere. That statement should strike a chord with all who heard him. But because it is true, all who heard it pretended it was not said.

The Bishop was on solid ground when he uttered what he said. The proofs are everywhere: In August 2015, the Adamawa State government announced that it had earmarked N200 million to engage prayer warriors against Boko Haram. In March 2016, a certain Aminu Baba-Kusa, once a powerful executive director of the NNPC, appeared before the High Court in Abuja with a witness statement and disclosed in it that a total of ₦2.2 billion was expended, not for arms or intelligence, but for prayers, solemnly commissioned to hasten the fall of Boko Haram. The money went out in two waves: ₦1.45 billion first, then another ₦750 million. It was a contract sanctified by faith and sealed by silence.

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Nothing that has happened in the last ten years suggests a change of strategy. Marabouts still cash out from a mugu nation and a leadership that worships in unworthy shrines. Kukah stepped on toes; he said the manipulation of religion for politics, using religion to enforce power, has become destructive to religion in northern Nigeria. It took remarkable episcopal courage for Kukah to say publicly that northern politicians use Islam for political cash-out. I watched the Sultan, calm and angry at Bishop Kukah for daring to stray away from the book he was asked to review into a realm angels fear to tread. As the Sultan spoke, the TV man’s camera panned to a defiant Kukah fiddling with a piece of pamphlet.

Speaker after speaker spoke on what they thought caused insecurity in northern Nigeria. I waited in vain to hear the Generals acknowledge that northern children, denied books and purpose, are the soldiers of chaos in Zamfara, Sokoto, Niger and, now in Kwara. In vain I listened to hear the truth from our Generals that today’s violent elements, products of a past of negligence, are proof that unattended scars can erupt again in new forms of pain.

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Our Generals are searching for what is not lost. The spring head of terror and terrorism in northern Nigeria is the wrong religious philosophy which atrophies millions of children. Every child anywhere, including in northern Nigeria, wants and deserves what General Obasanjo called “better life.” A child who has opportunities for self-discovery and development won’t be readily available for employment by merchants of terror. Terrorism will dry out the moment its recruitment market winds up. Educating the street children of the North, and equipping them with the right skills will sound the death knell of Boko Haram and banditry, its brethren. But this is where even the Generals feared to tread last Friday. They were afraid of the clerics in whose hands lie the yam and the knife of power and privileges.

The people who spoke at that event were not up to ten. Several scores of other big men and women were there, silent and quiet, sometimes clapping. They either did not have the chance to be called to speak or they did not want to speak and be quoted into trouble. But, really, what is trouble? Trouble can sneak into the hole of silence. Jeff T. Johnson writes in his ‘Trouble Songs’ that “Trouble may appear in a title and disappear in a song,” and “’Trouble’ may sneak up in a song without warning.”

Trouble is Nigeria, the sick, denying its illness. Real trouble is homicidal or suicidal silence; it is treating eczema when leprosy is the ailment.

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So, at the risk of courting abuse and insults and threats, I join Bishop Kukah in urging Nigeria to stop keeping quiet in the face of evil. Enough of saying that you do not want to ruffle feathers or open old wounds. Wounds that refuse to heal should be opened and given the right medicine. That is what heals.

A broken nation, sworn to silence, or to denial of truth, hurtles down a roller coaster of failure. Silence scars with ugly gashes. Screaming within, yet saying nothing out is sickness. The Yoruba say silence is the foundation of misfortune. Speaking out does not mean you will die young, broke and broken. Not speaking out when you have a voice is no guarantee for safety and comfort. Bishop Kukah’s Hausa proverb is the ultimate counsel here: “Not going to the toilet does not mean you won’t be hungry.”

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Group Defends VC Selection At FUGUS, Alleges Sabotage By Petitioners

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A Civil society organisation, Kwararafa League for Good Governance has raised the alarm over what it described as a coordinated attempt to undermine the ongoing process of appointing a new Vice Chancellor at the Federal University, Gusau (FUGUS), Zamfara State.

In a strongly worded petition addressed to the Honourable Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, the group condemned a recent lawsuit filed at the National Industrial Court, Abuja, by three academic staff of the university, namely Professors Ahmad Galadima, Ibrahim Garba Zurmi, and Dr. Anas Sani Anka, against the university’s Governing Council and Management.

The petitioners had challenged the Council’s adoption of a minimum of ten (10) years post-professorial experience as requirement for applicants vying for the position of Vice Chancellor, a criterion they argued was designed to disqualify certain candidates.

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In a counter petition to the education minister, the Kwararafa League insisted that the criterion was valid and aligns with directives issued by the Federal Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission (NUC), particularly a pronouncement made by the Minister in May 2025, which emphasises on adherence to this standard by all university councils.

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It is important to note that for the fact that some universities refused to abide by the directive does not make it legal or constitutional,” the group stated in the petition signed by its coordinator, Samuel Bature.

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The group also accused the petitioners of pursuing selfish agenda and attempting to destabilize the institution.

They alleged that the Pro-Chancellor, Hon. Aminu Sani Isaac, may have prior connections to one of the claimants who reportedly received informal assurances of being appointed Vice Chancellor despite not meeting the advertised requirements.

Describing the lawsuit as “baseless and malicious,” the group maintained that the university has operated in full compliance with applicable laws and guidelines, and called on the minister not to recognise or support the ongoing legal challenge.

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This representation is made in good faith, as a body committed to fairness, justice, and the development of education in Nigeria,” the petition stated.

The League also urged the Minister to direct the University’s Governing Council to take disciplinary action against the trio involved in the litigation, citing their actions as detrimental to the peace and credibility of the university system.

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Copies of the petition were also sent to the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), the President of the National Industrial Court, and the Pro-Chancellor of FUGUS.

As the legal and administrative battle continues, stakeholders in the education sector await the ministry’s response and the final outcome of the Vice Chancellor selection process.

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Oba of Benin Renews Bond With Ancestral Relations, Nigerians During Emorhọ Feast

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The palace of the Oba of Benin was agog with activities during the 2025 Emorhọ fest, declared by Omo N’Oba N’Edo Uku, Uku Akpolokpolo, Ewuare II, Oba of Benin as part of activities to mark the ancient Emorhọ, otherwise known as the ‘New Yam Festival’.

Oba of Benin, who reenacted the age-long festival, renewed the bond that exist between him and his ancestral relations from Issele-Uku in Aniocha North Local Government Area of Delta State at the event, which attracted dignitaries, including Benin people, indigenes and non-indigenes across Edo State.

Members of the Benin Royal family, Edionwere (village heads), youth leaders across the various communities in Benin, market women group, palace chiefs, traditional priests and priestesses in Benin, were also in attendance.

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A special prayer offered on behalf of the palace by Chief Enorense Ozigbo-Esere, the Osuma of Benin, paved the way for the commencement of the feast, where Secretary to the Benin Traditional Council, Frank Irabor, welcomed guests and highlighted the essence of the gathering.

Speaking in an interview, Oba Ewuare younger ancestral relations from Issele-Uku led by Chief Michael Odiakosa, expressed delight for the privilege to be part of the historic celebration.

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He explained the relationship between Benin and Issele-Uku, reaffirming that, “Issele-Uku is an extension of Benin Kingdom. We are all descendants of Benin. So, we are at home”.

READ ALSO:Oba Of Benin Ushers In ‘Emorọ’

We are in a safe place. We came to celebrate the festival with our father, the Omo N’ Oba, and we are happy to be here”, Odiakosa said.

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On his part, 99-year-old Pa. Paul Osarumwense Oyemwen, the Odionwere of Orior-Ozolua community in Uhunmwode LGA who thanked the Oba for the gesture, said the festival is not new in Benin and it’s devoid of sacrifices.

Expressing her appreciation to the Oba of Benin, the ‘Edo markets leader’, Pastor (Mrs) Josephine Ibhaguezejele, noted that members of the group have been waiting anxiously for the opportunity to partake in the yearly festival, while praying God that the blessings of the festival to transform lives.

Also speaking, Pa. Daniel Osunde, the Odionwere of Idumwun-owina, N’ Iyeke-orhiomwon, also prayed for the Oba and thanked the first Class traditional ruler for his foresight.

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Excited guests in their numbers were fed with African delicacy, amid dancing and jubilation, while members of Isikhian women group who gave a good account of their stewardship, were not left out in the celebration by the Oba who rewarded them with cash gift and other items in acknowledgement their duties in Benin.

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