This disability is ruining me in terms of my physical state. If I let it ruin my emotional state, that means I am losing on both sides. So, I tell myself that if this disability is defining my physical state, I can’t let it define my emotional state…

If there is one word that describes what made me set out for this story, it would be curiosity. However, this was no ordinary curiosity but one born out of the desire to understand the realities of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in Nigeria. Having come across news articles and social media posts, and even authored a few reports on the struggles of PWDs, I imagined what it’s like for students with disabilities in tertiary institutions. How do these students, in their quest for formal education, navigate the bitter-sweet terrain of tertiary institutions? In search of answers, I visited five schools in Lagos, Oyo and Osun states between July and August and uncovered some truths about inclusive education.

BEYOND WHEELS AND CHAIRS

Before Blessing Omowumi gained admission in 2019 to study Nutrition and Dietetics at the Federal Polytechnic Ede, Osun State, she had always known that navigating the school in a wheelchair would not be easy.

Now in Higher National Diploma (HND) 1, whenever 27-year-old Omowumi looks back at her National Diploma (ND) days, she remembers how she deprived herself of breakfast to avoid answering nature’s call to the toilet during lecture hours, how she held urine for hours because there was no toilet she could use and how colleagues lifted her and her wheelchair through the staircase leading to her lecture room because there were no ramps.

There were still no wheelchair ramps or accessible toilets when I visited Ede North Campus of the polytechnic in August, but Omowumi has grown accustomed to this. Like other students, she sometimes uses the bush behind the building where she receives lectures as an HND student.

“I can say my HND days are better than during my ND,” she says. “Apart from not eating throughout the day until lectures were over during my ND days, the need to use the toilet would sometimes become unbearable, and I would have to rush home to use the toilet in my house,” she adds.

READ ALSO: SPECIAL REPORT: In Ekiti, PWDs Pass Employment Exams, But Gov’t Won’t Give Them Jobs

Blessing Omowumi Source: Blessing Omowumi.

She was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when she was much younger. Muscular dystrophy is a group of genetic diseases that cause the muscles to weaken and break down over time. Simply put, it makes walking, swallowing and even breathing difficult.

Though her symptoms did not appear until she was 12, she started using a wheelchair in 2017. She was 20, and walking had become a daily struggle.

“Before then, I managed to walk, but it had worsened by 2017. I would twist and hold a wall then lean close to the wall while using my hand to support my movement. Later, I could not raise my upper body any longer. That was when I started using a wheelchair,” Omowumi explained.

GAPS IN EDUCATION

She completed her secondary school education in 2013, four years before she began to use a wheelchair to aid her mobility.

This means she had a six-year gap between when she had her Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE) and when she gained admission to a higher institution.

I later discovered through interactions with those in other institutions that post-secondary school gaps before enrolling in higher institutions of choice are common among students with disabilities — and through no fault of their own.

Omowumi, for instance, wanted to continue her studies, but she had to stay at home because her family longed for a solution to her physical condition. So, off they went from one prayer house and hospital to another.

Her family also had genuine concerns about how she would cope with the demands of a higher institution. It wasn’t until later that they learnt that her condition could only be managed with treatment. It has no medical cure.

“We were hoping that there would be a solution before I could proceed. But as time went on, we realised that I was just wasting my time. My mom was so worried about how I was going to cope in school,” Omowumi said.

“I believe it’s because we did not have a broader knowledge of the disability world then. When I started meeting other people with disabilities, we felt like it was possible [for me] to do [go to a tertiary institution].”

READ ALSO: Despite Anti-discrimination Laws, Persons With Disabilities Are Still Subjected To Stigmatisation

Although Omowumi was admitted to Ede Polytechnic in 2019, she and her coursemates began their first semester in 2020, following the school’s academic calendar.

“When I resumed, it was very hard,” she said. But one thing that helped her was that she had envisaged it, so it wasn’t too shocking,” Omowumi told EQ.

“One thing that helped me was that I expected it to be hard though support from my colleagues made it easier for me.”

Unlike the storey building that contained the lecture halls designated for ND students, where she now receives lectures is in a ground-floor building. However, she still requires assistance from family or friends to move her wheelchair.

I also observed that the two functional entrances to the multi-room building were not easily accessible. Someone has to be around to raise her wheelchair for smoother movement. The road from the main gate was not smooth. The tarred part of the road appeared to have seen better days. This video footage shows grasses that made the path to the building housing her current lecture hall uneven.

Main gate of the campus. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

The current lecture room. Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

One of the entrances. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

PWDs ACT, ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

In January 2019, former president Muhammadu Buhari signed the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Prohibition) Act 2018 into law. The act aimed to make provisions for the full integration of PWDs into society.

Beyond banning any form of discrimination against PWDs, this act promotes their right to access the physical environment and buildings on an equal basis with others and mandates accessibility of all public buildings.

This act says public buildings are to be constructed with accessibility aids, such as lifts, ramps, wheelchair passage and turning space, handrails, and others for the ease of persons with disabilities. Also included is a five-year transition period when all public buildings that were previously inaccessible to PWDs must be modified.

With the five-year transition period ending in January 2024, have all public buildings been modified to meet the accessibility requirements outlined in the act for persons with disabilities?

If accessibility for PWDs remains a challenge in Nigeria, can we truly say that inclusive education is a reality for students with disabilities in higher institutions? Or is it more of a myth?

The United Nations (UN) says inclusive education ensures that design and physical structures, teaching methods and curriculum, policy and practice of education environments are accessible to all students (at all levels) without discrimination. According to the UN, placing students with disabilities in mainstream classes without these adaptations is not inclusion.

In Nigeria, the PWD Act states that “all public schools, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, shall be run to be inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities”, and every school should have special facilities and trained personnel to cater for the educational development of PWDs.

Sections 17-20 show what the Act says about inclusive education. Source: NCPWD

READ ALSO: 4 Times PWDs Accused KFC of Discrimination in Different Countries

EDUCATION ON WHEELS

When Omowumi realised that the lecture building assigned to ND students at Ede was a storey building, she thought the school would take steps to aid accessibility.

It was fellow students who rallied round to help, not the school. Her class was upstairs, yet the school made no effort to ask her what it could do to make learning accessible. “It was like a lone fight. But fellow students have been nice and supportive,” she said.

Navigating the four walls of the higher institution without the support of family members, friends, mentors and sponsors, makes the educational pursuits of students with disabilities difficult.

At the early stage of school resumption, a senior student saw Omowumi struggling on a particular day and helped her up the stairs.

“He gave me his number and said I should call him every morning so that he could help with getting to lecture halls upstairs. That’s the part of the support I got from students. My coursemates, too, as we were going upstairs, to the laboratory, coming back to class, going to the kitchen, coming back to class, they would help,” she said.

From her lens, the school is not inclusive in terms of physical accessibility features. Also, there is no preparation and improvement of existing structures to accommodate students with disabilities. EQ emailed the school about this on October 30, but no response came.

Upon discovering that her ND class was on the upper floor, she reached out to the department president for assistance. Perhaps the lecturers or the school management would be kind enough to change the designated classroom to accommodate her needs.

“The president of the department said he would speak with some lecturers, but the COVID-19 lockdown started along the line. When we came back to school, he said we would have to start the discussion all over again, but no positive response came out of his efforts,” Omowumi recounted.

“They said nothing could be done about it because that class was assigned to ND students. That was the only time I tried to reach out to anyone.”

The support system for students like Omowumi always comes at a cost. For instance, she and her family used to live in Ibadan, Oyo State, before she gained admission. When a family friend who used to accompany Omowumi to Ede could no longer assist her, one of her younger sisters had to switch schools to be closer to her.

“My mum and other siblings later relocated to Ede,” Omowumi told EQ. At the time I visited her school, her siblings, who were in secondary school, were on holiday.

In the morning, they would help her get to class from their house, which was about a 10-minute walk from the school. One of them would wait until she was done with classes to help her back home. Her coursemates also helped her push her wheelchair around campus.

“Once schools resume, my siblings and I will leave the house early. They will first assist me in getting to class before they head to their schools. If the class is going on for longer, I’ll still be in school till they have closed from theirs. If I am done with my classes before they return from school, my mom will come and get me,” Omowumi explained.

Besides Omowumi, I spoke with two students on wheelchairs at Redeemer’s University, Osun State, and the Federal College of Education (Special) in Oyo State. The three of them live off-campus even though their schools have hostel facilities. Their reasons for staying off campus have to do with accessibility and space.

From the outset, Omowumi did not consider the school hostel as one of her options for accommodation. But at Redeemer’s University, Ayobami Balogun, a student of the Department of Business Administration, stayed in the school hostel in his first year.

The school bought him his electric wheelchair. It made movement much easier.

His disability could be categorised as a congenital limb deficiency; his lower limbs are bent backwards. “None of my siblings are like this. I have asked myself over and over why I was born this way. I have asked God, too. And my parents,” Balogun says.

When he’s not in his wheelchair, he moves with his hands and knees. He has assistive devices strapped to his knees to prevent injuries when moving without the wheelchair. This is how he accesses buildings that have no ramps: he’ll park his wheelchair close to the entrance, step out of it and head to his destination.

Balogun’s wheelchair parked close to a block of lecture halls. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta//EQ

Though the majority of the buildings in the school have ramps, some don’t. Some ramps are also too high for a wheelchair user to move on without hassle.

Nevertheless, they have students’ toilets Balogun could use, a missing feature at Federal Polytechnic Ede.

While he spoke about the conscious steps the school had taken to accommodate him as a student in a wheelchair, he said: “When I gained admission, the school had to build ramps in some places that did not have it before so I could move freely.

“For new buildings that are under construction, they would sometimes call me to come and check out the ramps on my wheelchair to test the comfortability.”

Ayobami Balogun. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

While he was staying at the hostel, the stares, the pitying look and the concern made him uncomfortable. So he sought off-campus accommodation.

The stares of pity have not stopped, and Balogun says they hurt because he sometimes feels out of place in the school.

READ ALSO: Inside Oyo Federal College of Education Where Cows Learn With Students — Despite Signposts Against Grazing

LEARNING FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED

Like Omowumi, some of the students I spoke with at the Federal College of Education (Special) in Oyo and the University of Lagos (UNILAG) were not born with disabilities.

“In the visually impaired community, about 90% of us are those who were not born blind,” says Harry Jackson*, one of the students.

He was a teenager in secondary school when he went blind. His parents took him to hospitals and religious houses, but none helped restore his sight. He had to learn to walk without the aid of his eyes. At the time, attending a higher institution was the last thing on his mind.

Then in 2018, a radio programme raising awareness about people with disabilities changed his life. “That was when my hopelessness turned to hope,” Jackson says. When he first learnt that visually impaired people could go to school and learn via the programme, his first thought was: “How will I mix with blind people?”

It took him months before he mustered the courage to reach out to the host via the number made available to listeners. “I called because I had been at home for years, unable to go to school while my younger ones were progressing with their studies,” he said.

“When I dialled the number in October 2018, the person who answered the phone was the secretary of the association. When he mentioned that a visually impaired person could operate a computer and smartphone, I asked him how that would be possible.

“We booked an appointment for me to come to his office. I almost missed it because the person who was supposed to lead me to his office came back around 4:00 pm and the man was supposed to leave his office by that time. I had to beg him to wait for me. When I got there, he told me I could still go to school. I was given a braille, and I wondered how I was going to use it to read.”

He was enrolled in a school for special needs in 2018, where he learnt to use the braille, a tactile writing system that allows blind and partially sighted people to read and write.

Fast forward to 2024, Jackson is now a student in a college of education.

‘No Grazing’ sign at FCE.

For Balogun, navigating the school environment has not been a pleasant experience. “What the disabled face in this college is not what we expect. It’s getting out of hand. For you not to find yourself inside a gutter, you have to be careful when moving around. I feel all the gutters are supposed to be covered to help visually impaired students so we won’t fall inside [the gutters],” Jackson told EQ.

Not only that, these students are at risk of being knocked down by cars. In an earlier report, I detailed how cows grazed in the school despite signposts saying: No grazing/animal tending in this college. I reached out to the school regarding this in August, but I got no response.

Jackson and another student told me that there is an unwritten rule at FCE that ensures visually impaired students occupy the front rows of classrooms while receiving lectures. “It is a culture in this college. Even if we were late, nobody would occupy those seats before our arrival,” he said.

Because it is expected that the lecturers would typically stand in front of the classroom, sitting in the first rows enables these students to put their recording devices on the table to record the lecture for future revisions.

FCE Oyo. Photo credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

However, they raised some concerns about their learning materials.

“In some courses, we have inclusivity while others lack it. For instance, some courses have audio materials, which were recorded years ago. The problem we are having is that some courses are outdated and yet to be updated,” Jackson explained.

These students clearly understand that education could change their story for good. But it comes at an extra cost for them.

Some of the students with disabilities prefer to live off-campus because they feel the hostel would not be conducive for them, even though it’s cheaper.

“Many visually impaired students live off campus, and the reason is that the school hostel is not properly managed. Those who have stayed there in the past complained about their belongings being stolen by sighted students, and how they were placed with people they could barely understand, such as mixing a student with intellectual disability with a visually impaired student in the same room. I can’t see him, and his disability will make it difficult for him to communicate with me,” Jackson told EQ.

According to another student I spoke with, grazing cows, along with reckless drivers, tricycle riders and motorcyclists are among the challenges that make learning difficult for visually impaired students.

While recalling an experience with a car that brushed him while trying to avoid another one, Jackson said he only heard the hooting of the first car. “I thought I had crossed to a safe path only for me to be hit. I fell and my phone dropped, too,” the student recounted.

Though some of them have human guides, many of these students have to navigate the school with the help of their walking canes.

On days like this, they are often afraid of drivers who fail to slow down.

“They don’t care whether this place has people with disabilities. They don’t care at all. While some of us can still try to walk without a human guide, some are scared of walking alone even with a cane guide. They are afraid of cows, okada (motorcycles) and cars. Some of us will have to wait for a colleague or someone who can take us around.”

One of the VI students also talked about how he was cheated by a motorcyclist he paid about N1,200 for a trip of just N300. Only after he got home and asked someone to help him count the remaining money did he realise what had happened, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Beyond these challenges, ground-floor and storey buildings within the college had wheelchair ramps. And the major road networks were tarred.

VOLUNTEER GUIDE AT UNILAG

In UNILAG, the roads and walkways were tarred and tiled, and the entrance stairs feature wheelchair ramps.

The Faculty of Arts building, a multi-storey structure where the exam took place, had an elevator that the visually impaired students and I used that day. However, one of them mentioned that it did not always work, so they would have to use the staircase with the help of their guide cane or with colleagues.

One of the things I found fascinating was these students’ mastery of their environment. With sensory inputs and individual strategies, they have a keen sense of their surroundings. They know the direction of offices and classrooms and know when to turn left or right, as long as they are in the right spot in the first place.

My visits to UNILAG in July coincided with the university’s second-semester examinations. I volunteered as a guide for some visually impaired students during this period.

A volunteer guide assists a student to the examination hall from the hostel or a previously decided spot. The guide sits beside the student often in the front row, collects the question paper and the answer booklet, and reads out the questions to the student without disturbing other students in the hall.

The guide will also assist with writing the matriculation number, course title and course code on the answer booklet, including the number of answered questions. He or she will fill out the attendance form and help append the student’s signature with a thumbprint. This involves rubbing the tip of a pen across the student’s thumb and pressing it onto the paper.

On my first day, I found that technology, especially accessible laptops, earphones and flash drives, was an important ally of visually impaired students. I was supposed to help only one, but I had to assist three students because the guides for the other two could not make it. Thankfully, their exam for that day was the same. I simply sat in the middle while doing my part.

You have to notify the students of the number of questions they are required to answer and if there are compulsory ones. When you read out each question, the visually impaired student will type out the preferred ones on their personal computer before they start typing the answers.

While typing, the earphones will be plugged into their ears so that the enabled text-to-speech feature on the laptop can be accessed without distraction.

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology converts written text into spoken words through synthesised voices, helping users to access written content without visual reading. With the TTS, visually impaired students can navigate the nooks and crannies of their laptops.

Meanwhile, the students’ laptops must not be connected to the internet while an exam is ongoing. This is to prevent examination malpractice.

Depending on the situation, a student could request the volunteer guide’s help to write out the answers they are typing on the laptop into the answer booklet. This often happens when an invigilator is not ‘willing’ to accompany the student to the departmental office where the typed answers, which would be saved as a document and transferred to a flash drive, could be printed out.

UNILAG. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

Entrance staircases and wheelchair ramp. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

Entrance staircase, wheelchair ramp at UNILAG. Photo Credit: Abimbola Abatta

On my first day as a guide, one of the three students in my care mistakenly cleared his answers. It was a two-hour paper, and he was almost done. Almost! I could feel his agitation beside me as he and I tried all we could to restore the answers that had vanished.

He had to start all over again. I explained his plight to the invigilator who wondered how it happened. Although he gave all the visually impaired students an extra 30 minutes (I later learnt that it was the norm to give students with disabilities in the school extra time to finish their work), there was no way this student could rewrite what he had spent almost two hours answering in such a short time.

But he did his best.

Another student also had an issue with his laptop. He had to borrow a friend’s laptop that morning because his computer was faulty. We spent almost 30 minutes trying to get a hang of the laptop. Also, he left his earphones at the hostel. My pair of earpods were useless because, somehow, the Bluetooth feature on the laptop was not functional. He managed to use the laptop.

When we went to the departmental office to print out their saved documents, it turned out that we transferred an empty document to his flash drive. I almost went crazy on his behalf.

I took his laptop and combed through the saved documents. Then fortune smiled at us — we found the right document, and the staff member in charge printed it out.

LEARNING WITHOUT HEARING

Ola Ali*, one of the students with hearing impairment interviewed, wanted to be the first deaf doctor in Nigeria. Discovering that Nigeria already had one only strengthened his belief that his dream was valid.

He wanted to study medicine and surgery, but now he’s pursuing special education in biology. The high fees of the state-owned university he wanted to attend, coupled with not meeting the cutoff mark in another, made Ali opt for FCE Oyo instead.

Regarding his ambition to be a medical doctor, Ali says, “The dream is still alive.” Despite not being financially responsible for his higher education, his parents, particularly his father, did not support it.

“Everyone has a bitter story,” he says. “My father was angry when I came to school. He did not want me to go to school.”

Ali was not born deaf. He could hear until he was five years old when he was involved in a minor motorcycle accident. He said though it was not a serious accident, it marked the start of his hearing loss.

“I began to lose my hearing gradually. I also had measles, which worsened my condition,” Ali told EQ.

He says he misses the days he used to hear. Before he gained admission to school, he thought he was the only deaf person in the world.

Education was the last thing on his mind, too. His father wanted him to be an artisan, but he knew communication would be a barrier. He said he sensed that he was made for more.

When Ali got an offer from someone willing to sponsor him to a higher institution, he was more than grateful. He gained admission to FCE in 2021, and it was there that he learnt sign language.

“Upon getting to FCE, I did not associate with deaf students. I would rather mingle with those who could hear. But then, I could not communicate with any of them. I had not learnt sign language, and I could not talk. So, I was neither here nor there,” Ali recounted.

“I eventually devoted three months to learning sign language to enhance communication. I also started mixing with deaf people so I could understand the sign language. There are different sign languages. I had to learn everything.”

For students with deafness or hearing impairment, technology is also an essential tool. The students showed me how they use Live Transcribe, a mobile application, to get real-time captions. All they have to do is open the app, stand close to where people are talking and speech is turned into written words.

HOW DISABILITIES SHAPE COURSE CHOICE

One of the reasons Omowumi chose to study Nutrition and Dietetics was because she felt it would not be too demanding.

“When I was in secondary school, I did not even know anything about this course, but because I had already spent so many years at home. And during this period, it was not as if I was studying. We were going from one church to another hospital here and there, so I felt I was not as brilliant as I used to be,” Omowumi said.

“I actually thought the course would be less stressful, not until I got here and saw that it’s not as easy as I envisaged. But then, I am not lagging behind. I have had to be extra serious. I don’t miss lectures, tests, assignments, practical reports, etc.”

For Jackson, certain courses are practically difficult for students with disabilities. For instance, he says, studying Mathematics as a visually impaired student in Nigeria is difficult.

“I can’t even say those who are doing it are wasting their time because there are no mathematical instruments that visually impaired students can use,” Jackson claimed.

“Science courses are generally difficult for visually impaired students to study. People have withdrawn from science courses because they could not cope.”

In 2023, Stanley Onyebuchi, the National Association of the Visually Impaired (NAVI) President, said tertiary institutions rejected some members of the association in their choice courses.

EXPERTS’ VIEWS ON INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

For education to be inclusive, Dagbo Suleiman Saka, the director of the National Resource Centre for the Disabled (NRCD), FCE Oyo, and a deaf lecturer at the college, said it must consider the peculiarities of the disabilities of students.

“Inclusive education says the deaf, blind, physically handicapped, the disabled should gather in the same class with the same class teacher. How possible is this? No matter the argument, it’s not possible,” he explained.

“Generally, the deaf, blind and physically handicapped are not disabled. All of us depend on both the natural and the nurture, which are the two aspects surrounding education. If a hearing child born naturally intelligent does not enjoy proper nurturing, the intelligence will deteriorate. The same goes for the deaf and others. The way to nurture a hearing child is different from the way you nurture a deaf child.”

According to him, a deaf child who attends primary and secondary schools where sign language is the language of the environment, with good teachers, skilled sign language and good instructional materials, will grow with good language.

“By the time he’s finished secondary school, language is already established. It will make it easy for him or her at the higher institution, the tertiary level,” Saka told EQ.

He added that poor understanding, which can be traced to the home, often fuels wrong beliefs about persons with disabilities.

He said positive attitudes towards people with disabilities at home will influence how students interact at school and promote cordial relationships between disabled and non-disabled students.

Interview with Dagbo Saka, the director of the National Resource Centre for the Disabled (NRCD) at FCE Oyo, with a sign language interpreter. Credit: Abimbola Abatta/EQ

The NRCD director said another challenge of inclusive education is that just as the deaf need interpretation and the blind need braille, interpreters need more practice for their skills to improve.

“Without braille and proper interpreting, education for the deaf and blind is not complete. For the deaf, interpreters are not enough and it is difficult for them to interpret everything, depending on the lecturers. Some interpreters won’t catch up with the speed at which some lecturers talk. At times, the interpreter has no choice but to skip some parts,” Saka explained.

Adaobi Chums-Okeke, a disability advocate and software engineer, said Nigeria is still far behind in the race for inclusive education as accessibility for people with disabilities is largely left to chance because most buildings are not accessible and newer ones only show minimal intentional efforts.

“In terms of inclusive education, we’re not there yet at all. I can’t even say we’re 50% there yet,” Chums-Okeke told EQ.

She said her struggles as a wheelchair user, who had to be carried up a four-storey building for practicals and missed classes for a semester and a half because her wheelchair couldn’t fit through the door, are some of the reasons she campaigns for inclusion and accessibility. 

“One day I fell off. I didn’t get to the ground because the lecturer noticed I was falling and then people gathered and tried to catch me. It was a pretty scary time,” Chums-Okeke said.

“They’re not considering people with disabilities. People are left thinking, ‘Do they want us alive? Do they want us to live? Do they want us to live a good life?’ If the government considers that people living with disabilities in Nigeria are humans and they have the right to live, the right to education and the right to have their personal life, they will be more intentional with some of these things.”

Regarding the PWD Act, she said the implementation is at zero level and many don’t even know it exists.

“Unless you search for it online, there’s no awareness of the Act. After awareness, we should talk about implementation because it needs to be implemented. If they can renovate buildings, people can have more accessibility,” Chums-Okeke told EQ.

CAN’T LET DISABILITY RUIN MY EMOTIONAL STATE

If there is one thing that is peculiar to each of these students, it would be their resilience and optimism. No disability is strong enough to clip their wings or kill their dreams and aspirations. I still remember Omowumi’s words when I asked about her mental health:

“This disability is ruining me in terms of my physical state. If I let it ruin my emotional state, that means I am losing on both sides. So, I just tell myself that if this disability is defining my physical state, I can’t let it define my emotional state.”

EQ sent separate emails to UNILAG, FCE Oyo and Redeemer’s University on Tuesday.

The emails EQ sent to two email addresses for Redeemer’s University bounced back.

EQ obtained the WhatsApp number of Redeemer’s University on its website and sent a text message on Wednesday. The school had neither acknowledged nor responded to EQ’s message at press time.

For UNILAG, no response was received from the four email addresses copied in the message. Three of four FCE Oyo addresses returned EQ’s emails with error messages. The fourth FCE Oyo email address had not responded to EQ at press time.

While responding to a WhatsApp message sent on Wednesday, Ajayi Gbolahan, the public relations officer of FCE Oyo, wrote: “Come to the college, and I will direct you appropriately.”

*Some names were changed as requested by sources.

This story was produced with support from the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) under the Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability project (CMEDIA) funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
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