A Principal Assistant Registrar at University of Lagos (UNILAG), Babatunde Oseni, is currently involved in a sexual harassment scandal following a report filed against him at the security unit of the institution by a female colleague.
The accuser, Tawa Akande, a GL6 Library Assistant currently attached to the maintenance unit of the institution, submitted written complaints and audio clips as evidence, according to Premium Times.
Akande alleged that Oseni forcefully kissed and molested her in his office at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Idi-Araba campus of the university, in October 2021.
Oseni, who is the faculty officer, is also the chairman of the UNILAG chapter of the Association of Nigerian Universities Professional Administrators (ANUPA) and a member of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU).
According to Akande, she had been the faculty’s library officer before Oseni, a lawyer, was transferred to the faculty.
She said Oseni, as the faculty officer and head of the registry staff usually sent her on errands including “typing and printing documents for him instead of asking the faculty secretary to do so.”
“Sometimes, he would ask me to close the library – my office, to stay in his office. He would invite me to his house to cook for him but I always insisted that as a married woman I couldn’t do that,” she said.
Akande said in October 2021, she needed to pay up a loan at the university’s cooperative society in order to be qualified for a new loan.
“So I approached Mr Oseni to lend me N40,000. I promised to pay up as soon as the loan was approved. And he gave me,” she explained.
She said Oseni then appointed her to coordinate a team of junior workers in the faculty to stamp answer scripts for students examinations.
“He was staying on the main campus and I was staying in Mushin at the time. So, he would give me the key to his office and said I must resume there before his arrival, especially when we were stamping the scripts.
“So on that fateful day, I got to his office around 7:30am and I was busy with the answer scripts when he opened the office. But rather than answering my greeting from a distance, he simply moved near the corner where I was working and bent down to forcefully kiss me. I was dazed and I slapped him immediately,” Akande said.
Akande noted that she rushed out of the office, panting and sobbing.
“Because my eyes were red and I was nervous, a driver in the faculty approached me to find out what transpired and after much hesitation, I narrated my experience. The man advised me to report to the management but there was no evidence,” she said.
Akande said the unnamed driver even offered her his phone so she could return to Oseni to record their conversation as evidence.
“But I couldn’t summon the courage to do that then.
“Since then, I have avoided Barrister Oseni’s office and rejected all his entreaties. But I was also looking for an opportunity to get evidence for what he did to me,” she added.
Akande said when it was time to refund the loan given to her by Oseni, she decided to pay N20,000 instead of the N40,000 she borrowed.
Due to their strained relationship, she said, Oseni reported her to her colleagues and the dean of the faculty about the money owed him.
“That was what gave me the opportunity to meet him, and I asked him if he also told the dean how he sexually harassed me, and how I slapped him. And that was how we reopened the conversation to catch him red-handed on tape. I recorded everything,” Akande said.
The accuser also recorded and submitted a conversation of another officer in the faculty, an assistant registrar, Fredrick Edebiri.
He was said to have offerered to provide “original condoms” for Akande to avoid pregnancy if she agreed to sleep with Oseni.
Edebiri also offered to ask Oseni if he would consider marrying Akande if she gets pregnant for him.
He assured Akande that she could not be pregnant for Oseni and offered her “original condoms” worth N7,000
In separate interviews with PREMIUM TIMES, Oseni and Edebiri accused Akande of setting them up.
Oseni said he would not want to react on the matter unless cleared by the university authorities to do so. He, however, denied any wrongdoing.
On his part, Edebiri said he knew nothing about the duo’s relationship, saying “he was only engaging his colleague (Akande) in a conversation in his usual free manner.”
He said he had earlier warned Oseni not to lend Akande money because he knew her to be a “perpetual debtor.”
“I advised Oseni based on my experience with Tawa who refused to pay me twice until after a very long time and struggle,” he said.
According to Edebiri, he was involved in the matter only when Oseni reported Akande to him over her failure to refund the loan and threatened to involve the dean.
“So I told her to refund Oseni to avoid being reported to the dean. That is all that I knew until the following day when she called me out of my office to discuss this matter. She asked questions in a friendly manner and I didn’t know I was being recorded,” he said.
Following the report by Oseni, the Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Aderonke Adepoju-Bello, said she called a meeting of concerned faculty members including Edebiri, and “resolved the matter.”
Adepoju-Bello refunded Oseni and got Akande to agree to a convenient time she would be able to pay her.
“I also warned them to desist from such conducts because the tape when played was very embarrassing to me. I also warned the lady to stop borrowing around,” Adepoju-Bello said.
Meanwhile, Akande alleged that due to the conflict, Oseni refused to endorse her Annual Performance Appraisal (APA) form.
“The dean eventually signed for me instead of Mr Oseni,” she said.
Akande said in November 2021, the matter was brought to the attention of the human resources unit of the university, which eventually transferred her from the faculty.
“I was first transferred to the personnel unit but in less than 24 hours, I got another letter that I should join the maintenance unit of the (UNILAG) Senate building,” she said.
She added she was asked to delete the recordings and “I did but not all.”
“Since last year when the matter was settled, he thought I had already deleted all the evidence, Mr Oseni started harassing me physically whenever he saw me on the campus. He would call me names publicly and warned people to avoid me because I’m a bad woman,” she said.
Akande and Oseni recently met at the reception of the university’s senate building, the accuser said, adding that Oseni “publicly assaulted her.”
The accuser added that the elevator operator, who she identified as Mr Dayo, was forced to tell Oseni to stop embarrassing her.
The medium reported that the matter almost degenerated to ‘fisticuff’ between Oseni and Dayo, leading to Akande’s decision to report the matter at the university’s security post.
On July 25, the security unit submitted a report on the matter to management, which immediately set up a six-member committee, with the university’s Director of Distance Learning Institute (DLI), Uchenna Udeani, as chairman, and Abolade Akinwunmi, a Principal Assistant Registrar with the Records Unit, as secretary.
Other members of the committee include the immediate past Registrar of the University, Folasade Ipaye; acting Chairman of the UNILAG’s chapter of SSANU, Olusola Sowunmi; Iyabode Ogunniran of the Department of Public Law, and one other person, as members.
The committee was given three weeks to submit its report.
