ASUU, ex-Unilorin VC meet Senate tomorrow

Taiwo Adisa, Abuja - 28.01.2008

The National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Dr. Abdullahi Sule-Kano, will lead a team of his executive officers to confront the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Professor Shuaib Oba Abduraheem, at a sitting of the Senate Committee on Federal Character and Inter-Governmental Affairs which is seeking details of the allegations of financial impropriety levelled against the former Vice Chancellor by ASUU.

Chairman of the Committee, Senator Smart Adeyemi, had told journalists last week that his committee had summoned ASUU to defend allegations against the former Vice Chancellor, who appeared before the Committee last week.

The Senate Committee is currently screening Professor Abduraheem, who has been nominated by President Umaru Yar’Adua as the Chairman of the Federal Character Commission (FCC).

The meeting, scheduled for last Friday, could not hold as it was gathered that ASUU was unable to make it. A source in the Committee, however, confirmed that ASUU leaders had written the chairman of the Committee ahead of its failure to keep the Friday date and that the leadership of ASUU had sought for the approval of the Committee for another date (tomorrow).

“The National President of ASUU and his team will be in the Senate to defend their allegations against Professor Oba Abduraheem tomorrow. They could not make it on Friday but they had written a letter ahead to the Committee Chairman, seeking another appointment for tomorrow,” a source said.

But ASUU officials recently stormed the National Assembly to submit petitions that implore the Senate Committee to reject the nomination of the former Vice Chancellor.

ASUU in the petition claimed that the former vice chancellor was unfit to occupy the position having been allegedly indicted in a visitation panel report on the University of Ilorin in 1999.

ASUU said that the former Vice Chancellor was guilty of financial impropriety, fraud and mismanagement while in office as a vice chancellor.

But the former vice chancellor, who appeared before the committee last week defended himself against the allegations, claiming that he was actually a victim of “mistaken identity.”

Professor Oba Abdu-raheem stated that he ran into bad weather in the running of the affairs of the university because ASUU and other unions had constituted themselves to a bastion of opposition to the then Federal Government and that they saw him as an agent of the opposition when he was appointed.