President Bola Tinubu has appointed John Oladapo Obafunwa, a famend forensic pathologist, as the brand new director-general of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR).
Obafunwa additionally earned the title of the worst vice chancellor Lagos State University (LASU) ever had throughout his tenure between 2011 and 2015.
Nigeria’s presidency introduced Obafunwa’s appointment on Monday.
The professor’s administration was marred by protests from the college’s workers and college students who claimed Obafunwa was a horrible VC.
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Lecturers and college students nearly bodily attacked Obafunwa at LASU’s 19th Convocation Ceremony in 2014.
“We deliberately wanted to embarrass him (Obafunwa) because we knew many parents and guests would be here. The man is stubborn, and I can tell you he is the worst vice chancellor we have had in this school,” Kabir Ola, a LASU protester, told journalists in August 2014.
Under Obafunwa, LASU was infamous for official malfeasance and unaccountability. Students usually wrote examinations with out receiving their outcomes, and lots of graduates couldn’t get their certificates for thus a few years. His successor as VC discovered a backlog of 70,500 certificates that had not been issued to graduates nearly one decade after they left the college.
Obafunwa failed to deal with these points, and lecturers couldn’t get the vice chancellor to assist them with lingering owed salaries. The respective associations of scholars, non-academic workers and senior tutorial workers banded in opposition to their vice chancellor.
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Obafunwa’s tenure as LASU vice chancellor ended slightly abruptly. Many workers and college students didn’t keep in mind the previous vice chancellor fondly when Adigun Fagbohun succeeded him.
In reality, in March 2015, all of the unions within the college — the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities (NASU) — mentioned they’d sacked Obafunwa and that the 20th convocation of the univerity wouldn’t maintain until the federal government appointed one of many two deputy vice-chancellors to preside over the ceremony.
This stance they maintained regardless of authorities’s earlier pleas with the employees for them to permit Obafunwa full his time period, which was to run out on October 31, 2015, simply seven months after the convocation.
Despite his unpopular tenure as VC, Obafunwa is a revered skilled in forensics and pathology.
He was the provost of the Lagos State University College of Medicine between 2006 and 2010, and is broadly thought of as one among Nigeria’s foremost medical consultants. He has been Lagos State’s main forensic pathologist for over a decade.
He succeeds Babatunde Salako, whose tenure expires on July 23.
