Sex for grades: How lecturers across Africa prey on female students
Sexual misconduct of lecturers with a low moral compass, has become so pervasive, it has advanced from a prevalent endemic to a customary pandemic.
What you need to know:
- Many female students across African universities report being pressured or coerced into sexual acts in exchange for good grades, admission, or basic resources.
- Despite policies prohibiting such behaviour, investigations have exposed numerous cases where lecturers abuse their power, with little accountability.
- The trauma experienced by survivors can have severe psychological impacts and derail their academic careers.
Sexual exploitation of female university learners by lecturers, has for decades permeated the fabric of higher learning institutions. Unwelcome, unsolicited and unreciprocated sexual overtures have been normalised and converted into an obscene cultural convention, that's used as a manipulative weapon to prey on female students.
Sexual misconduct of lecturers with a low moral compass, has become so pervasive, it has advanced from a prevalent endemic to a customary pandemic. Media houses across Eastern, Western and Southern Africa have published researched accounts of lecturers grossly abusing their leverage over students.
Verbal accounts by female students indicate that failure to abide by lecturers' lewd sexual demands results to victimisation and their courses being stagnated. A host of sexually enthused lecturers subsequently hold students under siege by threatening to flunk them and obstruct them from graduation, for not conforming to their sexual propositions.
Former Nigerian government spokesperson, University of Lagos and Harvard educated journalist, Olusegun Adeniyi, denotes the atrocity in his conscientious book. In Naked Abuse: Sex for Grades in African Universities, he articulates how an ever-increasing number of male academic staff engage in overt sexual activities with female students, expounding how male lecturers have scant regard for the emotional welfare of learners and believe they can wishfully victimise students, without repercussions. This has accelerated systemic gender inequality in tertiary institutions and stripping women of their dignity, mental disposition and self-respect, while exposing them to sexually transmitted infections.
Some of the highest publicised cases in Nigeria occurred in Ekiti Osun and Ondo States in Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, and Ambrose Alli University in Ekpoma. Here, male professors brazenly demanded sex from female students in exchange for marks, with lectures using good grades as bait to seduce female students.
Eight hundred female undergraduate students sampled for the study stated that they had been pressured or enticed into sleeping with academic staff. The unwelcome formality has turned majority of African universities into commercial sex centres, programming female students into believing that sex has to be transactional and dispensed in exchange of promotional advancement in future occupational endeavours.
Having perfected their predatory skills over a lengthy period, lecturers are often surgically precise in their intimidation attacks and aptly perpetrate their masculine aggression to repress their defenceless victims, majority of whom are from impoverished backgrounds.
In return for sex, female students are promised a plethora of benefits including bed spaces in dormitories and admission to tertiary education for students who don't attain cut-off marks. The study stated that 83.3 per cent of male lecturers within the sampled vicinities engage in sex with female students, with several students being flunked intentionally for absconding sexual inducements from lecturers.
Disciplinary action
This is regardless of existing policies that universities constitute to prevent sex between staff and students. Majority of tertiary education administrators support the non-sexual policies between students and lecturers in principle, but not in practice.
They are often culpable of obstructing justice and concealing the behaviour of perverted staff that's guilty of insubordination. They delay and omit disciplinary action, prevent prosecution of lecturers who sleep with minors, and engage in numerous forms of subterfuge, deterring the ability of survivors in disclosing incidents, for fear of retaliation.
In majority of facilities, female students have quantified that their performance is not primarily based on merit, but predicated upon sexual conformity to academic staff. This has left their young minds in a psychologically surreal dilemma that often results to succumbing to the pressures of male sexual aggression.
Sexual exploitation of students can have both immediate and long-term traumatic consequences for survivors that include increased anxiety, low self-esteem and a decrease in focus and productivity. During her medical studies at the University of Lagos (Unilag), Nkiru 'Kiki' Mordi's academic dreams were terminated because she persistently declined sexual advances from a lecturer, who then held her exam results in retaliation. She eventually dropped out.
In 2019, while working for BBC Africa Eye, she created a year-long researched documentary, where she exposed Unilag and University of Ghana lecturers who were preying on students. Unilag senior lecturers Dr Boniface Igbeneghu and Samuel Oladipo were dismissed in 2021, due to the exposé.
Dr Igbeneghu was caught on camera bragging about sleeping with university students after seducing them in the Cold Room - a senior staff club within the university's proximity, where lecturers habitually accosted female students for sex. Dr Paul Kwame Butakor and Dr Ransford Gyampo of the University of Ghana were also exposed in the documentary, but were never dismissed.
In 2001, Zimbabwean leftist paper Daily News reported how the vehicle of University of Zimbabwe senior academic staff member was burnt by male students, exhausted by lecturers' habit of visiting female student dormitories for sex.
Makerere University went a step further by suspending a Ugandan lecturer Edward Kisuze, for forcefully performing oral sex on a female student in his office on February 17, 2018.
Olusegun Adeniyi captures all these in his book and emphasises that sexual coercion by lecturers towards female students has emanated into a catastrophic destruction of promising academic careers. This has resulted to a spillage of incompetent graduates and damaged the credibility of the literate community within the African continent.
Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother
