By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
2025 has not been easy on Nigerians. The economy has looked far from bright; the weather has been suffocating; and cost of living has been stubbornly oppressive. With rising massacres in the Middle Belt, and Borno State in the north-east apparently losing ground to the nihilism of Boko Haram terror, violence remains unremitting. In the Niger Delta, a judicially manufactured crisis of political godfathering threatens serious repercussions for the national purse and endangers rent and royalties from the wells of oil-rich Rivers State. All this unfolds under the watch of a president who appears to have grown into a habit of sending episodic missives to Nigerians from his preferred base in Paris and occasionally paying a visit to Abuja from there.
Each of these developments is eminently newsworthy. Together, they should grip attentions about the goings-on in the sixth most populous country in the world. Instead, the biggest news out of Nigeria this year is the failure of Nigeria’s men of power to manage libidinal sexploits in the workplace, and the accompanying tendency to default to abuse of power to inter any resulting embarrassments.
Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is the Senator for Kogi Central and, by herself, 25% of the female contingent in the Nigeria’s Senate. Her detailed allegations of sexual harassment against Senate President Godswill Akpabio would probably have long ago run their course if the chamber and its leadership had approached the matter with due regard to any rule book. Instead, they chose to orchestrate the longest-running political soap opera in Africa’s most populous country.
As with these things, most people no longer remember the complaint because the cover-up procured by abuse of power has been more impressive. It has guaranteed that this story has “dominated conversations and highlighted longstanding women’s rights issues in the socially conservative country, where no woman has ever been elected governor, vice-president or president.”
For many, any suggestion that it is abnormal for a man not to get excited in the presence of a woman in the workplace is perplexing to the point of vexing. In a case in 2016, a lawyer representing a powerful international organisation in a case of sexual harassment before the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) told the judge that “it is expected among adults that a man would naturally chase a woman, make romantic overtures.” Few have paused to ask what exactly “sexual harassment” means, why it matters and why it is such a lingering issue in both work spaces and public institutions.
In 2011, the Lagos State Criminal Law made sexual harassment a felony. The law describes the crime to include “unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favours, and other visual, verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature which when submitted to or rejected” could affect or unreasonably interfere with the employment or educational opportunities of a person; become a factor in their academic or employment decision, or create an intimidating, hostile or offensive learning or working environment. Other states like Ekiti and Kaduna states have followed the example of Lagos in making sexual harassment a crime.
Sexual harassment can also create civil liability. Stella Odey was a widow with four children when the development organization, CUSO, hired her for your years in January 2015 as project manager. At work, she found herself under a male boss who repeatedly told her that “her voice arrests him, slapping her buttocks and embracing her against her will and consent.” He was reluctant to hear her protestation that she desired to remarry.
In July 2015, 14 days after Ms. Odey gave her boss a card inviting him to her wedding, he summarily sacked her. In upholding her claim of unlawful termination, the National Industrial Court pointed out that “the main point in allegations of sexual harassment is that unwelcome sexual conduct has invaded the workplace.”
Four years earlier, the same court awarded quite substantial damages against Microsoft in Nigeria in favour of a female staff whose employment the country manager, a man, terminated after she refused his sexual advances.
While parliamentary sexploits in the Senate have brought much-needed attention to the subject generally, it remains the case that Nigeria’s educational and academic institutions are the places most persistently associated with sexual harassment. Nearly 45 years ago, in 1981, a mere two years after Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan was born, the report of the Presidential Commission on Salary and Conditions of University Staff chaired by Professor Samuel Cookey acknowledged an incipient problem of sexual harassment in the universities. Since then, the issue has grown in both scope and significance.
In 2024, a pioneering Baseline Survey conducted under the auspices of the Committee of Gender Directors in Nigerian Universities in partnership with the non-governmental organization, Alliances for Africa found that at least 63% of female students in universities in the country had experienced sexual harassment. The perpetrators included lecturers, staff, and students. The report acknowledged an absence of progress on this issue, citing “stigmatisation, absence of adequate institutional support, power imbalances between victims and perpetrators, lack of clear policies and procedures for reporting incidents.”
An ongoing scandal at the Federal University, Oye Ekiti (FUOYE), involving allegations of sexual harassment against the Vice-Chancellor, Abayomi Fasina, a professor, illustrates how bad the situation is. At the end of last year, it emerged that a female senior director at the university, Folasade Adebayo, had accused the Vice-Chancellor of workplace reprisals after she allegedly rejected his persistent sexual advances.
The Ekiti State Gender-Based Violence (Prohibition) Law creates a felony crime of sexual harassment, which occurs when there is “unwanted conduct of a sexual nature or other conduct based on sex or gender which is persistent or serious and demeans, humiliates, or creates a hostile or intimidating environment.” To prove her allegations, Mrs. Adebayo produced a sound clip of a telephone conversation with the Vice-Chancellor in 2023 in which he could be heard pleading that he would make her happy as long as she made him happy and confessing: “Let me tell you, I’m dying inside for you.”
After what was supposed to be an internal investigation, the Governing Council issued a statement this past week claiming that it had cleared the Vice-Chancellor of the allegations. Instead, it ordered various disciplinary measures against Mrs. Adebayo and the leadership of the Staff Union of the University (which made her allegations public) “for bringing the name of the university into disrepute.”
Without challenging the provenance of the sound clip or the veracity of its contents, the Governing Council instead “condemned the recording of the Vice-Chancellor without his knowledge and consent.” Yet, it resolved to advise the Vice-Chancellor “in writing to be more careful and circumspect in dealing with subordinates.” Not done with this piece of tortured administrative theatre, the Governing Council then announced that it would constitute a “peace and reconciliation committee to look into all the issues in the university.”
The performance of the Senate in the institutional calisthenics of inspired cover-up easily pales into insignificance beside the mastery displayed by the Governing Council of FUOYE. Under cover of high statutory authority, the Governing Council procured the burial of serious allegations that could be criminal in Ekiti while implicitly validating their veracity. Why would the Vice-Chancellor need gratuitous advice of the kind the Council will be offering if the recording lacked credibility? Unsurprisingly, the university staff union promptly denounced the decision.
The bigger problem is that the Council by this decision, destroys any hope of remedies for students, staff or anyone with credible claims of sexual harassment in the university. Instead, they guarantee exactly the opposite of what the university seeks to avoid: resort to public advocacy by victims. Anticipating that, the Governing Council of FUOYE says it will expedite the production of policies on cyber-bullying and the use of social media. The intention is not to help victims or to bring perpetrators to account. Rather, it seeks to perpetuate a culture of cover-up. Anyone looking for where the men in the Senate learnt their art when they were boys should look no further than a Nigerian University.
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
