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There is a growing phenomenon in the nation’s institutions of higher learning that needs urgent attention. It is the trade by barter business; the exchange of tangible and intangible things and the marketing of youthful flesh in exchange for marks. On campus, failure is a disease no student wants to contract, so the ambition to graduate at all costs, even if it is the “follow my people go” grade, has plunged a large number of female students into the ocean of “micro” prostitution.
Like the popular saying among the military people “soldier come, soldier go, barracks remain”, promiscuous lecturers have continued to trade in this dangerous market for many years. And many of them are not willing to retire! Generations of beautiful girls and ladies come and go, but some lecturers have stayed in the system for over 25 years, preying on innocent beautiful female students.
The rate at which lecturers brazenly demand for “flesh” from their female students as if it’s their birthright is really alarming. It is like an epidemic eating deep into the educational system. It’s baffling the way they go about devouring young girls in their teenage years; taking away their innocence, depriving them of the good life they deserve and worst of all, infecting them with various diseases that in some cases result in the untimely death of such girls.
Sadly, this is beginning to seem like a cultural heritage as it has been on-going for years now, being passed down from one generation of lecturers to the next. New lecturers even devise new schemes and tactics for getting female students to give in to their pressures.
These students are fed with the notion that they are inferior and would not pass a subject except they are helped. Some lecturers go as far as marking faces of some pretty students during classes and creating circumstances to get in contact with them. When they do, they toy with their minds and make them believe less in themselves. They feed these young girls with the notion that their bodies are a sort of legal tender. Painfully, these girls carry this notion out into the labour market, using their bodies as a means of exchange for favours.
A female undergraduate from one of the universities narrated her experience. According to her, many Heads of departments prefer dating pretty intelligent girls over the dull ones. They brag about dating the most brilliant girl in the department when they hang out with their colleagues. She narrated that after the first semester exams have been conducted, and the results released, such heads of departments would pick out the names of the brilliant and attractive ones and persuade them to date them, promising to reward them with distinctions in all their courses. And as for the dull ones that they find attractive, they will threaten to fail them and make them rewrite some of their courses.
It beats my imagination why these married lecturers with children would stoop so low, as to chasing a girl their daughter’s age, threatening to make her life miserable, making her rewrite courses, liaising with other lecturers to fail her and worse still shamelessly going against their marriage vows, as majority of them are family men.
Nowadays, a lecturer would liaise with another lecturer in another department or same department to fail a female student because she refused to befriend him. And painfully, the student is completely oblivious of what is going on and as such cannot lay her hands on the source of her travail. Worse still, these lecturers liaise as well with the male students who give them some details on the girls. They provide information on the girls level of association after school hours, whether they are the wayward type or not, and they go as far as finding out if the girls are virgins or not, among other vital details. So, it is more like a vicious cycle.
However, the most touching and saddening twist to the story is the fact that some of these girls actually go after lecturers. They walk to and fro a lecturer’s office, giving him signs that they are interested. Some of them walk into their lecturer’s office boldly in unimaginably revealing attire that can pull a man’s jaw to the floor, and propose to be their girlfriends in exchange for marks.
A course mate of mine was really very poor in many of her courses in school. She desperately wanted to pass even if it was just a ‘D’. She deliberately wore a really seductive cloth to her H.0.D’s office. She seduced him into having an affair with her. After he did, he of course failed her and he made sure that some other colleagues of his had a share of the free apple.
I am yet to see a lecturer that would refuse the advances of a female student. Though some struggle, but others give in willingly without even a second thought.
Painfully, in all of these, the girls are usually the victims of this trend. Some parents do not even know their daughters anymore; they have become strangers. These girls lose their self-value and self-esteem after being brainwashed and filled with so many lies. They go through depression, feeling exploited and some never remain the same. They do not know who to turn to for advice and sometimes even when advised, they are wrongly advised. They are afraid and mask their fears with anger and aggression and some do not have a care anymore because they feel they cannot make it except with their bodies. It is quite unfortunate what our education sector has become.
Chinyere Okeke
