A video showing some lecturers of Rivers State University, Port Harcourt, using scissors on a female student has caused outrage on social media.
In the video, a male lecturer Melford Itari restrains the student Princess Amadi while the female lecturer Blessing Timothy attempts to use the scissors on Ms Amadi.
The incident reportedly took place on Thursday at the Faculty of Law.
Amadi told PUNCH that the lecturers said she contravened the school rule about colour of hair.
She said, “It happened on Thursday at 11 am. They were going round for sensitisation on dress code. I was leaving my class and she (Timothy) called me to where she was. She started asking me: ‘What’s wrong with your dressing?’ ‘My bag?’ I replied. ‘Your bag is not my issue,’ she answered. ‘I asked her, what?’ ‘Are you asking me?’ She replied, turning to ask her colleague, ‘tell this girl what is wrong with her dressing. ‘ ‘Your hair, the colleague said. ‘My hair?’ I turned around saying ‘my hair is not long.’
“What do you mean by that? Is this the approved colour of hair?’’ Amadi quoted the lecturer to have asked.
The student noted that she, like other students, had been coming to the school with the hair, noting that brown attachment had always been used in the school even since the last semester.
Attorney general of the Law Students Association of Nigeria, Kelechi Nwodo, wrote a letter to the dean of the Faculty of Law of the university, Professor Christian Wigwe, asking him to act on the matter.
The letter, copied to the vice chancellor, Prof Nlerum Okogbule, read partly, “My attention has been brought to a distasteful and highly scandalous video emanating from your Faculty which showed an unruly display of aggression, intimidation and conduct likely to cause bodily harm, and disdain for the dignity of students by some lecturers of the Faculty masquerading as dress code enforcers.
“As evinced in the video, the said lecturers, Timothy and Itari, did not only harass the female student, but also endangered her life as the scissors wielded by Timothy in the video could have caused severe and life-threatening injury to the young student in the course of the encounter.”
The statement also revealed that the lecturers smashed the phones of some students who were recording the incident.
The association described this as a gross display of impunity and an embarrassing development coming from those who should know the law.
