The Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan, Prof. Abel Olayinka had earlier justified the closure of the institution, the Students’ Union President, Ojo Aderemi has however revealed how the VC could have averted the protest before eventual shutdown.
In an exclusive chat with InsideOyo.com on Tuesday morning, the union leader stated that the protest wouldn’t have been orchestrated if the VC had apologized for the hectic experiences of students while they await their students’ ID cards.
According to him, “We asked the Administration to appeal to students for the ordeals they have gone through. This could have stopped the protest”, he said.
Prof. Abel Olayinka earlier claimed that the institution has a compelling duty of instilling morals in the students apart from mere academic knowledge impartation.
He opined that the union leader was unruly behaved towards him necessitating the immediate closure of the school at the stance of students’ demonstration
“How do you describe a situation in which a 200 -level student asking the VC to come and apologize to him? Is it morally right for a student to be describing the VC as a disgrace? I was a student in this same university about 40 years ago, I still have some of my lecturers on the payroll of the university. I dare not disrespect them. In those days, you could not even look at an Assistant Lecturer eye ball to eye ball. But today, some of our mighty students want the VC to prostrate for them’.
According to him, “we suggested that they could use their library identity card, course form or clinic identity card as a means of identification to write the exams, they kept threatening that they would not write the exams unless the identity card was produced. And, I am not a magician that will produce 30,000 cards in a day”.
Also, Ojo Aderemi reverberated their other demands to InsideOyo before the imminent could be finally resolved. He also noted that union demands the immediate reinstatement of Phillip Olatinwo and others who were wrongfully suspended.
