While the recently suspended national strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities raged, the Lagos State University earned an extra-ordinary visibility. An unpleasant one. LASU again? Many wondered. The people’s amazement was not unfounded. The two immediate past vice chancellors were literally sacked by the staff even as the tenure of each of them was already running out. But then, Governor Akinwumi Ambode, on assumption of office in 2015, had the daunting task of taming the seeming wild LASU forces.
Incidentally, the new governor’s deputy, Dr. Oluranti Adebule, is actually on leave from LASU. She had been on leave prior to her emergence as Ambode’s deputy, having functioned as Secretary to the State Government in the immediate past regime of Governor Fashola. Doing the very best for LASU, therefore, appeared to be compelling.
A swift scan through Ambode’s profile presents him as a thoroughbred professional with distinguished academic records and, therefore, one that may be inclined to be strongly supportive of the education sector. An alumnus of the renowned American Hubert Humphrey Fellowship scheme, his other distinctions include being one of the best graduating students in his set at the University of Lagos, in addition to being one of the best WAEC candidates in his year in the early 1980s.
Yours sincerely first encountered Ambode’s profile as a member of the Joe Igbokwe team of campaigners insistent on Lagos for good. For that team, the priority was to ensure that only the deserving should be allowed to run the affairs of Lagos State even as parties did not mind fielding just anyone. The potential voters in the state were promptly reminded of the looming danger in some of the candidates. Even as some of these candidates had done their best to sabotage peoples’ will in the very recent past, they still felt Lagosians were too gullible to note their misdeeds.
This writer first met Ambode when he brought his campaign to my neighbourhood at Protea Hotel, Ikeja. Fortified on his seat by NADECO’s all-weather, activist politician, Ayo Opadokun, and his scholar deputy at the Protea Hotel session, Ambode mustered all the possible wits at his disposal to assure and reassure the audience, heavily saturated by activists, that he would do his best for the Lagos youths in and out of school. He equally promised a better future for the civil society, for which he promised a stronger reckoning.
Not a few people have applauded Ambode’s bold move to establish the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, which has restored hope to several, otherwise hopeless citizens who are creative enough not only to employ themselves but also some extra hands.
For the in-school youths and the entire community of the only university owned by the state, Ambode’s vision for LASU seemed only next to that of the founder, Alhaji Lateef Jakande. The choice of the renowned sociologist, Prof. Bayo Ninalowo, as the chair of the university council, has been widely applauded for some obvious reasons. Ninalowo himself is a Lagos-based scholar, a teacher at the University of Lagos, who could not have been in the dark about the challenges of LASU. He can’t be led by the nose.
A most commendable consolidation of the above was the celebrated appointment of the incumbent Vice Chancellor, Prof. Lanrewaju Adigun Fagboun. This choice of Fagboun is significant for some reasons: It reassured members of the LASU academic community that the owner government still has a lot of confidence in us in spite of the rancorous past. Fagboun had invested his early career years in LASU before seeking to assert his competence and experiential asset in some other strategic environments. A leading light in environmental law scholarship, development activist, astute researcher and administrator endowed with uncommon capacity for warm disposition notwithstanding being a blue blood, Fagboun has, within two years, demonstrated his preparedness for the office beyond any doubt. VC Fagboun started well by ensuring university-wide circulation of copies of the published version of his vision for LASU.
As a fellow development enthusiast, what struck this writer mostly in Fagboun’s agenda, already running, is the democratised governance with human face. For more than a decade that this writer had served LASU diligently until Fagboun assumed office, ordinary information about most privileges meant for all LASU staff members were always concealed and often preferred to be wasted by those who called the shots across all levels. Especially under the regime immediately before this, I was a victim with regard to opportunities from TETFUND, Association of Commonwealth Universities, ACU; Association of African Universities, AAU, even when a personal friend and former teacher, Prof. Paschal Mihyo of Tanzania was its Executive Secretary.
Not a few people have applauded Ambode’s bold move to establish the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund, which has restored hope to several, otherwise hopeless citizens
Mihyo, a Pan-Africanist and former legal adviser to Mwalimu Nyerere, sought for opportunities and dispensed them to countless Africans, especially when he was a distinguished scholar at the Institute of African Studies, ISS, Hague Netherlands. The heartless people of power in LASU before Fagboun, soon extended their avarice to the support that Lagos State Government used to give academics in LASU for local conferences. They initiated the campaign that Lagos State was no longer interested in supporting experts to attend both local and international conferences as well as training schedules.
Enter Fagboun. No fewer than 30 committees were set up to cater to different spheres of the university’s activities. Besides such strategic committees as TETFUND, the university also has committees dedicated to hostel development in line with Governor Ambode’s vision to turn LASU into a residential university. There’s also the Internationalisation Committee that has been making effort to nurture the institution’s relationship with the international community.
Not again are members of the community diminished to such level as to keep depending on some favoured counterparts for information on rights and privileges. Indeed, even as there is still substantial room for improvement for the university’s information management team, the university information dissemination system is pleasantly different from what it used to be. The university has, therefore, started attracting good attention from interested parties, locally and internationally.
*Dr. Akanni teaches journalism at the Lagos State University. Follow him on Twitter @AkintundeAkanni.
