Dr. Olabode Ojoniyi, a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Linguistics, Osun State University, Ikire Campus caught on video having an affair with a female student, Mercy Ikwue, in 2017, has blamed ‘weak’ female students for the menace of sex for marks in Nigerian higher institutions.
The university’s Governing Council had terminated Ojoniyi’s appointment after the video emerged, but he was reinstated recently after the National Industrial Court in Ibadan, Oyo State, acquitted him of the charges and ordered the varsity to pay him his arrears for the time he was suspended and duration which his terminated appointment lasted.
Ojoniyi’s sex act was captured in a video which is believed to have been intentionally recorded by the female student.
The female student was said to have been pressurised by Ojoniyi for sex and she eventually agreed and followed him to their agreed place with a laptop computer from which she pretended to be watching a movie, but unknown to him, she was recording their sexual activities.
The lecturer had accused one of his colleagues in the university, who was recently dismissed for alleged misconduc, as the person behind the drama.
According to him, the lady was contracted to blackmail him, but he did not deny being the one in the video.
Relieving his experience in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune after he was reinstated, the lecturer alleged that weak female students always make advances for sexual relationship with lecturers to gain favour and boost their marks.
“Weak students are the ones who often seek to use sex to gain favour. Students should sit down with their academics and resist any lecturer who demands for sex to pass them,” Ojoniyi said.
Recalling the incident, Ojoniyi maintained that he was targeted, said, “You see, the story of results manipulation actually started with aggrieved students in 2015, and not 2016. Students who could not pay for their grades to be altered who then felt cheated by the ‘favoured crooks’ reported the case. They were the ones who reported the case of results manipulation by another lecturer to the then Ag. Dean. It was the Ag. Dean who first told me of it.
“My first reaction was that it was not possible. And, my reasons were very simple: the raw results were always kept with the Head of Department. After they were computed, they would be vetted in Osogbo by a professor who often would check against the raw results. So, expectedly, any reasonable person would not attempt to alter such results on the computer. But, what that lecturer was doing was reprinting new raw results, forging the signatures of the lecturers on them and replacing the originals in the HOD’s office with the ‘Oluwole versions.’
“Unfortunately for that lecturer, when I was the examination officer, for security reasons, I usually kept private copies of the original results that had been approved by the Departmental Board. My private copies were the copies with which the ‘Oluwole’ copies of that lecturer were exposed and that was my sin.”