OPF Urges Kwara Governor-elect to Halt Selection Process on Appointment of New KWASU VC

The Offa-born academics under the auspices of Offa Professors Forum (OPF), comprising more than 100 professors from Offa, Kwara State, have raised the alarm on the ongoing selection process of a substantive Vice-Chancellor of the Kwara State University, Malete, describing it as jaundiced and inequitable.

The group, in a statement issued on Monday and made available to journalists THISDAY in Osogbo, said the ongoing process was fraught with irregularities from the very beginning, and urged the incoming government to put a halt to it immediately.

The statement, which was signed by the Chairman of OPF, Prof Hussein Oyelola Bukoye Oloyede, urged Kwara State Governor-elect, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, to stop the current process.

The group urged the incoming government to appoint the most senior Deputy Vice Chancellor as acting VC and constitute a new equitable council.

The university, in accordance with its Act, had set in motion processes that would usher in a successor to the incumbent, Professor Abdulrasheed Na'allah, whose tenure will expire in July 2019.

At the close of applications last week, the university council had set up, beside the statutory Senate-Council Selection Board and the search team, an internal screening committee to specially scrutinise applicants from within the university.

But OPF faulted the selection process, describing it as “skewed and constructed in line with the recent Ilorin Emirate Descendants Progressive Union (IEDPU) clannish public declaration that it holds the forever-right to KWASU headship because it is cited on the emirate soil.”

It said: “With such mindset that is totally antithetical to the universality of a university and the expected academic excellence, the ideals of fair play and equity have been jettisoned for parochial sentiment.”

The group observed that given the kind of the university principal officers, where the chancellor, pro-chancellor, vice chancellor and the acting registrar are all from Ilorin, it is certain that candidates from the emirate are not only favoured, outsiders would automatically be sidelined.

According to the statement, “The vice chancellor is replaying an old script of 2009 when the selection committee was dominated by three Ilorin indigenes (Prof Abdulraheem Oba, Late Prof Shehu Jimoh, Alh Bolaji Abdullahi) out of four.

“The current selection committee with Prof Saka Nuhu (Chairman, Ilorin); Prof Hassan Saliu (Member Council, Ilorin); Prof Abdulrasheed Na Allah (VC, Ilorin), Alhaji Oba Aluko (Member, Ilorin); and Prof Kabir Solihu (Senate Rep, Ilorin) is the height of insensitivity to the diversity of Kwara State.

“The inclusion of Prof Mrs Temidayo Oladiji as Senate representative while on sabbatical leave is unknown to global best practice while having competent professors in-house, but who are perceived unnamable to parochial and primitive agenda of Vice Chancellor Na Allah and IEDPU.”

OPF further decried that a university that is supposed to be global in its outlook has become clannish in disposition to the extent that it has taken such blight to the public.

“Beyond the fact that KWASU is founded and being funded by all the local government areas in the state, academic excellence is hinged on competence and merit," the group added.