The Management of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoko, Ondo State, has denied a story making the rounds on social and other media that it meted out sanctions and punishments on members of staff that submitted memoranda and petitions to the Visitation Panel constituted to look into the university’s activities by the state government.
It will be recalled that an unsubstantiated story in some media had insinuated that ‘a senior officer in the Bursary Department was locked out of his office as a result of a letter he wrote to the panel.
It added that another senior officer had his official car withdrawn for the same reasons, while there were numerous cases of lopsided redeployment of staff that were perceived not to be on the side of Management’.
But a statement signed by the Institution’s Head of Information, Protocol and Public Relations, Mr. Sola Imoru, described the story as fallacious and a litany of lies. It added that, “the three cases cited by the publications are fallacious in content and bare in logic”.
It continued that, “To begin with, it is common knowledge that memoranda written to Visitation Panels are delivered under confidential cover. This truism raises the question of how Management would know the author(s) of submitted memoranda.”
The statement noted that as a creation of the law, Management has always been guided by the requirements of the law in all its dealings and will continue to observe the laws in the day-to-day running of the university in its dealings. Management, it said, would continue to be fair and just in carrying out the daily administration of the university.
The statement affirmed that it is the responsibility of Management to deploy and redeploy staff to areas and units where it believes the interests of the university would be better served by its members of staff.
It wondered why a section of the media would throw professionalism to the dogs by going to town with sensitive but unsubstantiated stories without hearing from the university Management.
The institution’s image maker thus urged members of the public, particularly the university’s stakeholders, to disregard the stories as they were mere figments of the imagination of the writers and the handiwork of fifth columnists that are bent on stirring up troubles to further personal interests.
It will be recalled that the State Government exercised its statutory function by setting up Visitation Panels to look into the state of affairs of the four tertiary institutions owned by the state. The panels were to, among other things, look into how the finances of the institutions were managed, nature and spread of staff recruitment, and the accreditation status of courses offered, among others.
