The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has raised an alarm that the Sexual Harassment bill currently before the National Assembly is targeted at the members of the academic community.
This was just as the National Female Students Association of Nigeria decried alleged harassment of its members in tertiary institutions across the country by randy lecturers.
National President of the student association, Micah Idongesit, at a pubic hearing of the sexual harassment bill on Monday lamented the spate of harassment of female students by lecturers.
In a memorandum submitted to the committee, Idongesit argued that passing the bill into law would ensure punishment of offenders guilty of the crime.
She said: “This is a bill that must be passed into law. It is either we enact this law to send sexual predator lecturers to prison for correction according to law under the fine democratic tenets of the rule of law or we provoke helpless parents, husband, or guardian to pick a loaded gun and deal with this problem in a barbaric manner”.
However, in his submission, ASUU President, Biodun Ogunyemi, said if the bill is passed into law, it would undermine the autonomy of tertiary institutions in the country.
The bill, he stressed, was discriminatory because it was targeted at educators.
“As a global norm, universities and other tertiary institutions are established by law as autonomous bodies and have their own laws regulating their affairs. This includes misconduct generally among both staff and students.
“Any law or bill which seeks to supplant these laws violates the university autonomy.
“In this particular instance, the bill violates the Federal Government of Nigeria and ASUU agreement of 2009 and as such should be rejected,” he noted.
According to him, sexual harassment is not peculiar to tertiary institutions alone.
Ogunyemi also pointed out that besides violating the constitution, the bill failed to take cognisance of extant laws that adequately deal with sexual offences.
However, the National University Commission (NUC) supported the passage of the bill.
Executive Secretary of the Commission, Julius Okojie,
The development comes as the House of Representatives has said it has commenced investigations into allegations of sexual misconduct against three of its members by the United States embassy, even as the embassy has already revoked the US visas of the accused lawmakers.
The US ambassador to Nigeria, James Entwistle, in a June 9, 2016 letter to Speaker Yakubu Dogara, accused three lawmakers of attempted rape and solicitation for sex, while on a recent trip to Cleveland, Ohio for the International Visitors Leadership Programme.
The accused lawmakers: Mohammed Garba Gololo (APC, Bauchi), Samuel Ikom (PDP, Akwa-Ibom) Mark Gbillah (APC, Benue) were on the trip with seven other House members.
Gololo allegedly grabbed a housekeeper cleaning his hotel room and solicited her for sex, while Gbillah and Ikom allegedly asked hotel parking attendants to help them find prostitutes.
OWEDE AGBAJILEKE
