LAGOS – The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and the 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.

According to a joint state­ment of the groups signed by Debo Adeniran, who doubles as CDHR president and CACOL chairman, the situation in the institution has already become a public concern, and should not be allowed to snowball into a na­tional disaster.

Giving a background to the crisis, CDHR and CACOL stat­ed that the groups are aware that some disgruntled workers of the FCET, Akoka, allegedly locked up their Provost’s office and issued him a quit notice from his official residence.

The statement said that led by a few members of the Se­nior Staff Union of Colleges of Education (SSUCOEN), FCET chapter, the protesters insisted 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 May 26, 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 May 27, 2023 before the amended Act was signed into law on June 12, 2023.

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.

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.

According to sources, 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.

On the part of the College, apart from the provost, oth­ers in attendance included the Chairman and Secretary of the Senior Staff Union of Colleges of Education, Augus­tin Nwachukwu and Kazeem Qadri, respectively; Caretaker Chairman of the Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union (COEASU), Ishola La­wal; COEASU’s suspended Chairman, Kolawole Ijaduno­la; Chairman of the college’s chapter of the Non-Academic Staff Union (NASU), Olasun­kanmi Alonge; NASU Na­tional Vice-President, Samuel Ogunmokun, among others.

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 seize to protest forthwith.”

It added, “We 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 jeopardising the academic activities of the students and thereby denying them the benefits of full-fledged tute­lage that they deserve from the college.

The CDHR and CACIL expressed worry 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 taxpayers 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, 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.