A great reformer got heckled out of office by the same powers and principalities he had tried to checkmate. But that setback turned a Pyrrhic victory.

His lasting legacies in academic reforms and campus sanity have trumped his traducers, giving the Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo, a fresh breath of life.

That is the tenure summary of Prof. Lateef Hussein (1946-2022), 6th vice-chancellor of LASU from 2005 to 2011. For his reformative pluck, he was dubbed “Saddam Hussein” by the hailing or nailing campus community during his activity-packed intervention years. He passed away on August 31 in Lagos, and has since been buried according to Muslim rites.

Before Hussein, a professor of Physics and Dean of the University of Ibadan, Faculty of Science, left UI for the LASU job, LASU was a hot bed of student cultism. Many of its academic staff was also well and truly shocking by their clannish mindset. Indeed, the students hailed one of Hussein’s predecessors as “Olori Ebi” (clan head), a moniker that VC perhaps swallowed to earn the loyalty of student hotheads and reckless staff in order to maintain some unholy peace.

As a hot bed of cultism and reckless academic unionism, LASU had become captive to a tiny but noise some cabal in the university community that routinely held the majority to ransom, as it did the university authorities — and crowed about it. Besides, Lagos, the epitome of cosmopolitan taste, was brewing a university, which was becoming the stark bastion of clannish thinking.

That double whammy deeply repulsed Prof. Hussein, so much that he swore to stamp it all out and replace it with global best university practices. Indeed, he re-shaped LASU in the image of UI, where hitherto he had spent most of his academic life. When Prof. Hussein arrived, LASU had developed a national notoriety in student cultism, with campus toughs preying on helpless campus girls. Control and monitoring was made difficult by near-zero night life on the campus, being a non-residential university. Many times, undeveloped areas of the campus passed for safe haven for cultist crimes under the pall of darkness.

For starters, Hussein relocated part-time students away from the main Ojo campus of LASU. Then, he weeded out many of the so-called campus veterans: “professional students”. By imposing rigorous academic monitoring, he ensured that students that had vegetated on campus for years after a four-year course, for instance, but still posted poor grades, were shown the door.

By the time he finished with that cadre, he turned his big guns on their colluders among the academic staff, thus imposing rare sanity on some hitherto untouchables. That sent out the alarm, long and shrill: a new sheriff was in town!

That breath of fresh air was what the quiet majority needed to rally round the new order. From the vice-chancellor, the clarion call was clear: LASU was an academic community and must be seen as such.

To walk his talk, he instituted direct interface with students, faculty by faculty, where he got feedbacks. That was held every semester. During those parleys, the issue of “missing results” — so rife back then — cropped up. He pronto set up a mechanism which compelled lecturers to timely fish out “lost” results, after students had lodged complaints, or face grave sanctions.

That proved hugely popular with the students, particularly female ones, hitherto routinely bullied by some unscrupulous academic staff. But as expected, it brewed distemper among the affected bully staff.

Still, the vice-chancellor couldn’t be clearer: Degree and allied diploma programmes must be treated with dispatch, so that students were promptly graduated. That was the turning point — which has defined the university till today, away from its old chaos.

Though Prof. Hussein’s second term was a shoo-in (he clearly did a good job of his first), the old guard, under unions early in that term, mobilized against him, alleging that he had neglected their “welfare”. That marked the end of his tenure — a fate his successor, Prof. John Obafunwa, would share four years later.

But no matter how his tenure ended, “Sadam” Hussein’s good works have triumphed over short-term challenges. LASU and its student’s post-2005 have been the better for it.

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