What used to be the holy book in this matter
Students under the aegis of the Broad Activists Group (BAG) at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in Nigeria are raising funds for their members they said suffered psychological, physical and material violence in the hands of the university security, the regular police and the DSS during a protestation of FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike’s visit to the campus early June.
The fund raising campaign sent to a long list of potential donors by the leaders of the group said what they get will help BAG to give the affected students adequate psychological and medical attention as well as replace their handsets allegedly seized or smashed by security operatives.
They are, by implication, challenging the OAU, Ile-Ife account of what transpired on June 5th, 2025 when the minister went to deliver a lecture on the campus. According to the Obafemi University media office, the students were arrested in their own interest so that they were not beaten by their colleagues who were keen to listen to the FCT Minister. And that there was no case of brutality by any layer of security operatives.
The starting point for all those who want to know what is going on in the universities
On the contrary, the funds campaigning statement says those arrested were not arrested because students wanted to beat them up but because they called Minister Wike a tyrant and were bent on resisting what they call “Wike’s incursion into an ivory tower”.
By their account, those arrested were released when the campus was getting tense as mobilisation for a showdown between the larger student population and the university was in full swing.
The number of students affected by the arrest and detention by security agents is not clear but two cases seems to be the immediate concern of the students.
The skirmishes at OAU will remind all students with any traces to radical ancestry in the decade of the 1980s what it was then. For sure, no political office holder whom students on any campus did not like could enjoy free entry and free exit although it is debatable if that Jacobinism should still be the case in the post-Cold War.
An account of how it was done then
What the radicals at OAU might have missed is the weapon of superior argument which would have enabled them to level up with the FCT Minister is what was called “the superior argument” model which was an intellectual intimidation tactic. But it is not the same as censorship which preventing anyone from entering a campus amounts to.
In those days, most student leaders could move mountains if they mounted the platform. So good at that as for the late Justice Mustapha Akanbi to tell a set of them that, in law, he could send them to jail but that they were too brilliant his conscience would not allow him do that. And that he saw in them the true future leaders of Nigeria.
It was after the ‘Ango Must Go’ nationwide protests in 1986 which the military regime wanted to use as an opportunity to jail some of the names on the list compiled by the intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, “they” gave the job to a judge with conscience. Akanbi was right. Some of the ‘boys’ of those days have been ministers, INEC National Commissioners and what have you.
Nigeria of today is simply not Nigeria of the Justice Akanbi days!
