Nigeria:Coalition petitions Muhammadu Buhari over plans to discredit NOUN VC

A coalition of 13 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari on what they called the activities of some sponsored Nigerians who are bent on discrediting the Vice Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Prof. Vincent Tenebe and his management team.

Speaking under the aegis of Civil Society Organization for Social Justice, Fairness, and Transparency (CESJET) in Abuja yesterday, its Executive Secretary, Torkuma Asongo, said efforts are on-going to arrest those behind the ugly incident.

Asongo said more worrisome to the group is the emergence of a group under the auspices of NOUN Congress of Staff and Students making  moves to extort, blackmail and intimidate the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Vincent  Tenebe and his management team into succumbing to funding  union activities where these elements would be able to steal under the guise of unionization.

Asongo said: “We have discovered that many universities Vice Chancellors who are afraid of having their reputation being tarnished have fallen prey to these unscrupulous elements.

“Since some professors are afraid of fighting back, it is imperative that we exhibit some amount of social justice, decorum and morality in our engagements with public servants as not to bring the structure of corporate governance into disrepute before the rest of the world.

“There is also the need for the President to come to their rescue before overzealous citizens take advantage of the war against corruption to defraud unsuspecting Nigerians under the cover of anti-corruption crusade within his regime,” he said.

Asongo said the coalition after careful verification discovered that the several petitions against Professor Vincent Tenebe and the management team of NOUN have ulterior motives.

“We suspect that the petitions are part of efforts to overwhelm the anti-corruption efforts with frivolities that will increase the workload of the statutory agencies and derail their focus.

“We  appeal to President Buhari to not only disregard the distractions of such frivolous petitioners but to also cause the relevant agencies to expose those abusing the nation’s scarce resources by sending anti-corruption bodies on wild goose chase.

“Our belief is that a timely intervention along this line will discourage those who want to distract or mislead the anti-corruption fight in the education sector and other sectors of our national lives”.

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