The Ekiti State University Alumni Association has countered the decision of the Governing Council of the university over the sack of about 600 staff members.
The group’s president, Oludotun Adetunberu who is also a member of the council said due process was not followed in the decision.
In a letter seen by EduCeleb.com, he called on the Governor Kayode Fayemi led administration to reverse the action as it hurts the stability of the University and threatens its autonomy.
He alleged that the Council did not consider the report of the visitation panel unlike what was widely reported in the media noting that there was a misrepresentation of facts at that.
He also highlighted the negative consequences of the decision on the integrity of many of the sacked staff who were allegedly denied fair hearing.
Read the content of the letter below.
13th December, 2019.
His Excellency,
Dr John Kayode Fayemi,
The Executive Governor,
Ekiti State.
Through:
Secretary to the State Government,
Ekiti State.
Your Excellency,
DISENGAGEMENT OF STAFF IN EKSU: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY.
Your Excellency, it is no more news that your second tenure in office is actually reclaiming the land and restoring the long lost values. This is evident in the way your government is repositioning every segment of the State affairs.
Ekiti State University Alumni is a very large if not the largest constituency in the State having over 400 thousand members. We appreciate the various reforms Your Excellency is carrying out in the University. Your recent gesture of five kilometre road is appreciated. The University community called for Visitation Panel, your government obliged without interference. The staff audit was a welcome development at not only repositioning the University financially but to ensure due diligence in the conduct of the affairs of the University. Your government is responsive. Our Association has joined in heralding home a new and purposeful Alumni tailored towards sporadic development through our interventions.
Your Excellency, there are good intentions implemented so badly. What would have been a great plus was handled with extraordinary executive dominance and now loosing its value. Your Excellency, the Governing Council of the University, of which I as the President of the Association, is a member, during its last meeting of 5th December, 2019, failed to consider the report on the Staff Audit properly. It was circulated on the floor of Council and withdrawn after ten minutes without study and was then driven through an executive and choral approval. It was evident that no member of the University Management saw the document before that meeting, meaning it was not considered by Management before Council. The more reason members would have been allowed to study and consider it properly before passage.
Your Excellency, the bad is that there are a lot of flaws in the reports: many members of staff affected were wrongly implicated, there were duplications of names. No doubt, implementing the report the way it was approved would create more damage to the University.
Your Excellency would wish to note that due diligence was not followed before compiling the list of staff to be disengaged. Many of them were properly employed with the University Governing Council approval based on specific Faculty needs ahead of Accreditation. Faculty of Law for instance is still awaiting the accreditation of the Council of Legal Education exercise by January, 2020 where it is hoped that the quota of the University for the Law school could be increased from 60 to 150. The same academic staff of the Faculty of Law that were presented for the NUC accreditation early this month have been disengaged. With the new development, only about 10 staff will remain in the Faculty of law as many retired, resigned, are on sabbatical or caught in the disengagement. The minimum number for each of the four Departments for the purpose of accreditation is 6. This would have been considered by Management if allowed to study it or raised at Council if members were not conscripted into approval. We should attend to it urgently to forestall the imminent loss of the Faculty accreditation with the Council of Legal Education. The huge money spent on the just concluded NUC accreditation of the Faculty will therefore amount to nullity. At the moment, many departments are left with virtually no staff. More worrisome are those approved by Council and employed to meet NUC accreditation requirements and now laid off. In the Faculty of Engineering, Assistant Lecturers and Technologists who were employed in 2016 and used to secure the NUC accreditation of the various programmes in the Faculty were also disengaged. Would these not be a fraud against NUC? Many more programmes are affected.
Your Excellency, it has been noted that the Consultancy Firm employed for the exercise did a shoddy job. In many instances, wrong documentations were done for staff, pointed out to them during the exercise, promised to attend and now implicated the affected number of staff. Another nasty documentation was that of present Provost, College of Postgraduate Studies who the Audit Firm claimed not to have a Ph.D degree graduated from Ekiti State University and had his Ph..D in 2004 and rose through the rank to the post of a professor in 2013. Also in the category are immediate past Provosts of Colleges of Medicine and Postgraduate Studies; Prof. Dipo Ogunleye and Prof, Oluwadiya respectively. Many Departments in the College in the College of Medicine were left with virtually no staff. For instance, the Departments of Anaesthesia and Medical Biochemistry have no staff at the moment. Same documentation affected the incumbent Dean of Law and also a member of the Council. There is even a case of one Ojo Kehinde, a Senior Executive Officer. He was ticked to have gotten a Ph.D degree instead of Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. His B. Sc was not ticked. He was therefore categorised as not having the requisite qualification for his job and disengaged.
Your Excellency, the ugly is that:
1) the report of the staff audit so executively withdrawn from Council members for no reason went viral all social media the next day thereby demeaning the integrity of Council.
2) by the way the affairs of Council is being run, the so much esteemed body may soon loose its credibility. Issues before Council should be allowed for discussion before people start misrepresenting your government Sir.
3) the publishing of the names of disengaged staff on social media has done a lot of damage to the esteem and psyche of the disengaged staff. They are thoroughly demotivated and sad at this material yuletide time. There are cases of Departments where every member of staff was disengaged. Departments like Tourism and Hospitality Management and Science Laboratory Technology. For Linguistics Department, only two members of staff remain. Many cases like these would join the ugly.
4) Your government that meant well for the University might be seen eroding the autonomy of the University when due procedures are not followed.
5) because of the flaws in the process, there may be a negative portray of government. Government must be seen as doing the right rightly.
Your Excellency, the Association is raising all these for our love for your government through your positive dispositions and interventions. We can not watch and see a derailment in the good things you stand for. It is therefore believed that the Council Appeal Committee would consider all the above and more that may be brought to the fore to correct the wrongs and really sustain the integrity and good purpose of government.
Your Excellency, we assure your government our best regards.
Signed
Asiwaju Oludotun Adetunberu.
Alumni President
