The Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), Kaduna State Chapter, has asked female victims of sexual abuse in universities and other tertiary institutions to speak out in order to put a stop to the ugly trend.
The association said that it will give legal cover to the victims and ensure that lecturers sexually exploiting and molesting their students are prosecuted and jailed.
The chairperson of the association, Mrs. Zainab Atoba, in an interview stressed the need for the victims to name lecturers and others.
”Our call is for all the student who have this kind of problem to come and speak out. If they don’t speak out we won’t be able to know what is happening for us to even come in to intervene on their behalf.
“We as FIDA our primary responsibility is protection, preservation and promotions of right of women and children where issue of sexual harassment occurs.
“If it is not brought to our notice there is no way we will know and for us to come out and carry out our function.”
According to her, FIDA has been carrying out a lot of sensitization, especially on issues of rape defilement, sexual harassment and abuses of all kind whether to women, the girl child or boys.
”So if these kind of things are happening and it’s not unveiling we wont be able to do anything,” she said.
Zainab Atoba said that the issue of sex for marks in higher institutions of learning is very disturbing and has been going on for quite sometimes.
“We are vehemently in opposition to this kind of issue happening in all the higher institutions.
“Even in secondary schools we have incidences of teachers trying to sexually abuse students, to sleep with them so as pass exams.
“It has been happening for a very long time and we are happy that students are now coming out to mention it to the hearing of everybody.
“Before now, students are afraid to voice out what was happing to them. We have a case of a professor that is in prison now for rape of a student in his office.”
According to her, FIDA is working with various groups tracking cases of all form of violence and abuse against girls and boys in the state.
On the ongoing investigation of a lecturer at Kaduna State University, accused of sexually exploiting his students, Atoba said FIDA would keep tabs on the outcome and ensure justice is done to the victims.

The Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Yusuf Buratai has said that the Nigerian Army needed more funding to execute the internal security operations, including the fight with Boko Haram insurgents.
General Buratai, who spoke through the General Officer commanding 6 Division of Nigerian Army, Major General Jamil Sarham today, October 28, in Uyo, capital of Akwa Ibom State, emphasized the need for the Federal Government to improve its funding to the military to meet with current challenges of curbing insurgency in the country.
According to him, the current funding is inadequate in view of the roles army is playing in internal security of the nation, adding that the Nigerian Army finance corps remained central to the performance and effectiveness of the army, both in operations and peace times.
In the keynote address on the 12th biennial training conference for the Nigeria Army Finance Corp, with the theme, “Expanding the roles of Nigerian Army in internal security operation: Funding Imperatives,” the Army Chief said that new strategies, including increasing capacity of troops in defense, logistics and intensified combat intelligence gathering towards wiping out the insurgents.
He said that army has started manufacturing military vehicles and equipment to boost operational capability and more recently the injection of the Super camp Concept, saying: “in order to mitigate the identified challenges, we have had to be innovative and inventive to devise new response strategies to combat the insurgents.
“Some of the strategies include increasing capacity of troops in defense, logistics and intensified combat intelligence gathering.
“We have also manufactured military vehicles and equipments to boost operational capability and more recently the injection of the Super camp Concept.”
He said despite some daunting challenges of operations, the army is gradually turning the tide against insurgents.
He commended the effort of the Army Chief Accounts and Budget with his team whom he noted carried out the role of Finance Corps effectively to ensure prudent management of resources to achieve value for money.
In his remarks, Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom, called on the private sector to assist in funding the operations of the Nigerian Army saying that government cannot do it alone
Emmanuel, who was represented by Mr Akan Okon, Commissioner for Economic Development and Ibom Deep Seaport, however, commended the army for its role in curbing insurgency, kidnapping, banditry and other security challenges confronting the nation.
Also, the Chief of Account and Budget (Army), Major General Adekola Bakare said that the theme was deliberately chosen to enunciate the challenges posed by inadequate funding of the army operations in spite of its expanding roles in internal security.
He said that the conference would afford participants the opportunity to conduct a detailed appraisal of the current policies and procedures towards repositioning the Corps to provide transparent and efficient services to the Nigerian Army.

The Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) has reached a consensus that state governments would have to negotiate with their individual workers on the implementation of the consequential increments of the N30,000 Minimum Wage Law.
The chairman of the forum and Governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, who read the communique emanating from the Forum’s meeting to newsmen in Abuja today, October 28, said that though state governors agreed to the N30, 000 minimum wage, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) did not determine what happens in the states.
He said that each state had its State Executive Council, which is the highest decision making body at the state level, adding: “the forum as the representative body of the states keenly followed what happened in the negotiations that led to that template.
“As far as we are concerned, the best the forum can do is to stick with what has been agreed with the states. States are part of the tripartite negotiations. States agreed to that N30,000 minimum wage increase.
“States also know that there will be consequential adjustment but that will be determined by what happened on the state-by-state basis, because there are different number of workers and different issues at the state level.
“Every state has its own trade union joint negotiating committee and they will undertake this discussion with their state governments.
“The day after this agreement was reached with labour, it was on record that I was on a national television and made the position of the governors clear that for us, this was a national minimum wage increase, not a general minimum wage review.
“Yes, that may necessitate consequential increment, we have no doubt about that but that is a matter for the states to discuss with their workers.”
Source: NAN.

Former editor-in-chief of the defunct Newswatch magazine, Ray Ekpu, has described bloggers in Nigeria as rumour merchants, cyberbullies that have constituted themselves into what he called “a problem for truth.”
“We have the bloggers who seem to constitute a problem for truth. They speculate, exaggerate, distort, mislead, quote dishonest, misleading, unverified sources or no sources at all.”
Ray Ekpu who spoke in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state, during a programme for journalists called “Retool Houses” and organised by the Next Edition Centre for Investigative Journalism and Gender Advocacy, in partnership with Policy Alert, and the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Akwa Ibom State Council, said the bloggers “are the smear campaigners, the lynch mobs, the rumour merchants, the cyberbullies, the anonymous tipsters, the trial judges by commentary, the purveyors of propaganda, the type that America’s Vice President Spirrow Agnew described as the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism”.
He made it clear that bloggers are not Journalists, explaining that journalism has a code of ethics to regulate the conduct of practitioners, as well as regulatory authorities such as the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation and the Nigerian Press Council.
“So anyone of us who comes into Journalism must accept that he or she must practice the profession according to its professional canons and ethics.pla
“It does not matter whether we are print media, electronic media or online media Journalists. The rules of practice are the same and the obligations of truth-telling and the fair discharge of our responsibilities are the same.
“That means that in our reportage and commentary we must exhibit qualities that can lead to the truth and the fairness that can build a sane, stable, peaceful, inclusive, united and egalitarian society. Any report or commentary that is the opposite of that is in my opinion reckless.”
Ekpu said every story, in journalism, must meet the basic requirements of accuracy, completeness, and fairness, and that there must be correction once it is discovered a mistake has been made.
“It matters because if you do not correct the mistake it will lead to people being misinformed. Misinformation can lead to poor decisions, sometimes decisions that are detrimental to the peace and stability of our communities,” he said.
“Many respectable media organisations in the world go to great lengths to establish the accuracy of their stories. They have structures that enable stories that are slated for publication or broadcast to go through the eagle eyes of several experienced journalists before they get to the consuming public as news.
“In Newswatch we had what we called The Three Source Rule. If a major story did not come from a document that we had ascertained to be genuine we had to get a confirmation from three sources to convince ourselves of its factuality.
“An American magazine the New Yorker has seven checkers whose responsibility is to confirm the accuracy of the information it wants to publish. The Reader’s Digest has 20 checkers who do the same thing.
“Some years ago I was surprised to get a call from Readers’ Digest. The magazine wanted to confirm a quote they took from one of my articles which they wanted to use under their quotable quotes column.
“They went into that much trouble to get their quote right. If only they knew the kind of excitement I got from being quoted by Readers’ Digest, they would not have bothered that much. But of course they did so because they are consummate professionals. This happened many years ago when there were no mobile phones and communication with people in Nigeria was close to impossible.
“Now we have the benefit of advanced technology which has given us the cell phones. With a cell phone, we can do several things in our line of business. We can listen to the radio, we can record interviews and pictures, we can do telephone or online interviews. These immense advantages should help to improve the efficiency of our practice. On the contrary, we seem to have converted the phone and the internet into instruments for the spread of what has come to be known as fake news. Some call it junk news, or pseudo-news. This is what used to be known years ago as yellow journalism.”