SIR: Only recently the Obafemi Awolowo University| (OAU) Registrar, Mr. D.A. Awoyemi, issued a statement dated December 3, 2015, in part: “This is to inform the generality of the students of the University and the University Community that the activities of the Students’ Union are hereby SUSPENDED by the University Authority until further notice.” (Italics mine).

Need we remind the university management or whoever signed this unfortunate release that the students, whose Union it SUSPENDED, are but adults? Are we to educate those who should know better, but deliberately chose to be ignorant, that these students have the constitutional right to freedom of association? What are Union members from the prestigious Faculty of Law doing about the alleged suspension?

Although, I graduated from the university about four years ago, it is baffling that the same issues we fought tooth and nail that led to the management proscribing the Union, are still the same issues under contention. “The issues are clear” as a former Speaker of the University’s Students’ Representatives Council (SRC), Comrade Sunday Adodo Destiny will always say. The issues are still clear – Welfare! Welfare!! Welfare!!! This has been the noble cry of the Ife University Students’ Union since 1976. The Union holds it as sacred, to fight for the welfare of all, including Management staff, within or outside the campus. The greatness of Ife, for those who know, is not due to its architectural edifice, but the strength of its Students Union. Few people are amazed that despite its size in terms of landmass, the campus is a hotbed for outlaws, cultists, drug addicts and other neo-Fascist elements. This has nothing to do with the “security” or the cowards – known as “crackers” (a group that sprang up as a result of the Ife/Modakeke crises) employed by the management as part of the University’s commitment to maintain people in its environment. Apart from molesting armless students and running after cheap ladies, what else do these elements do?

There are surprisingly those (many of them students) who believe that the Union has no value hence should be abolished altogether. To these ultraconservative elements, I have just one reply: If the Union has produced legends too numerous to mention for time and space, then I conclude that the Union is a formidable platform to train future leaders. Destroying this important platform is to weaken an important agent of political socialisation.

It is on this basis that I am calling all lovers of Ife University to prevail on the management to restore the Union. The handling of this crisis is going to be a litmus test for the new Ooni and the Minister of Education. This is why they both must apply a high degree of wisdom in this matter!

• Olalekan Adigun,
Lagos.