A sexual harassment report has been filed against the Principal Assistant Registrar of the University of Lagos, Akoka, Babatunde Oseni by a female colleague.
According to Premium Times, the accuser, Tawa Akande, a level six library assistant currently attached to the maintenance unit of the institution, submitted written complaints and audio clips as evidence.
However, Oseni denied the allegation.
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.
In a related recorded conversation submitted by the accuser, another officer in the faculty, an assistant registrar, Fredrick Edebiri, was heard offering to provide ‘original’ condoms for Ms Akande to avoid pregnancy if she agreed to sleep with Mr Oseni.
Messrs Oseni and Edebiri told newsmen in separate interviews the recorded conversations may have been doctored by the accuser.
Narrating her ordeal, she said Mr 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 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 Mr 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,” Ms Akande said.
“So on that fateful day, I got to his office around 7:30 a.m. 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.”
She said 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 added.
Ms Akande said the unnamed driver even offered her his phone so she could return to Mr 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.
Ms Akande said when it was time to refund the loan given to her by Mr Oseni, she decided to pay N20,000 instead of the N40,000 she borrowed.
Due to their strained relationship, she said, Mr 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,” Ms Akande said.
The accuser also recorded Mr Edebiri during their conversations on the same matter.
The recording, exclusively obtained by newsmen, revealed how Mr Edebiri offered to ask Mr Oseni if he would consider marrying Ms Akande if she became pregnant for him.
At another moment, Mr Edebiri assured Ms Akande that she could not be pregnant for Mr Oseni and offered her ‘original’ condoms worth N7,000.
In separate interviews with journalists, Messrs Oseni and Edebiri accused Ms Akande of setting them up, denying any wrongdoing.
However, the Dean of the UNILAG Faculty of Pharmacy, Aderonke Adepoju-Bello, a professor, also confirmed she investigated and ‘resolved’ the matter when brought to her attention in 2021.
A committee was set up to “investigate the alleged case of sexual harassment and conduct likely to cause a breach of peace of the University of Lagos.”
Professor Adepoju-Bello said she paid off Ms Akande’s loan, telling her to refund at her convenience and also berated Mr Oseni and Mr Edebiri, asking them to refrain from such acts.
The dean also told Ms Akande to desist from taking loans.
However, the resolution by the Dean didn’t seem to curb the accused assaulting nature, as the accuser, Ms Akande said she began facing public harassment from him, which led to the matter resurfacing again.
“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 campus. He would call me names publicly and warned people to avoid me because I’m a bad woman,” she said.
Ms Akande and Mr Oseni recently met at the reception of the university’s Senate building, the accuser said Mr Oseni “publicly assaulted her.”
The matter almost degenerated into fisticuff between Messrs Oseni and Dayo, leading to Ms Akande’s decision to report the matter at the university’s security post.
Which made the security unit submit a report on the matter to management On July 25, 2022, which immediately set up a six-member committee, with the university’s Director of Distance Learning Institute, 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.
Mr Oseni also refuses to comment on the matter as it is still being investigated by the school authorities.
