Where The Watchers Close Their Eyes
By Osuolale Oluwatomilayo
These are strange and revealing times at the University of Ibadan, times when rights are not only questioned but redefined into something unrecognizable. Permit this writer to turn back the clock, even as far as the early 1900s, to leaf through the ghastly pages of our collective history. When the British came, beat us into submission, and sold us into chains, we resisted. We fought until freedom was proclaimed in 1960, and for a moment, the story seemed to take a sweeter turn. Yet sweetness quickly soured when wars scarred the soil and tribalism poisoned the air; it was then we realized that the promise of freedom was already faltering.
In the haze of false pretense emerged a document now treated with disdain, the so-called Constitution. In Chapter IV, Sections 33 to 46, rights are etched as though sacred, carved with deliberate precision. But these rights stand as placeholders, a façade of liberty. They mask a hollow truth, for in practice it has been proven, again and again, that even a mere hiss of dissent can condemn a citizen to cages purposefully built to be their doom. And when one dares to ask why those entrusted with safeguarding liberty instead preside over its violation, the answer comes cloaked in sterile language: “a procedural breach.”
The University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, has always been more than a citadel of learning. From its inception in 1948, its students began to embody the role of a critical voice in national politics, transforming the Students’ Union into one of the most enduring symbols of resistance against both governmental excesses and administrative authoritarianism. To speak of the history of the University of Ibadan Students’ Union is to speak of a tradition steeped in defiance, marked by sacrifice, and constantly redefined by the battle over rights, power, and representation all in the anthem of aluta.
The 1960s announced the Union’s place in Nigeria’s political life when its activism played a decisive role in forcing the federal government to abandon the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact. That triumph was not just a victory of student resolve but a symbolic assertion that youth could bend the trajectory of national policy. From that moment, Ibadan students became both guardians and agitators, negotiating their existence in an uneasy space between the academy and the state.
The 1970s introduced blood into the narrative. On February 1, 1971, during what began as a protest over welfare inadequacies, Adekunle “Kunle” Adepeju, a promising undergraduate, was shot dead by the police. His death was not merely the extinguishing of a young life; it became a scar on the conscience of the Nigerian state and a reminder that even peaceful dissent could be met with brute force. To this day, the memory of Adepeju reverberates through the campus, his martyrdom echoing in commemorations that remind successive generations of students of the fragility of their rights.
When the storm of the “Ali Must Go” crisis broke in 1978, University of Ibadan students once again stood at the frontline. Their participation in the nationwide revolt against fee hikes reinforced the Union’s radical tradition. The movement, though crushed with tear gas and bullets, deepened the conviction that student unionism was a political project inseparable from the broader Nigerian struggle for equity. It also made visible a recurring pattern: the state and its institutions often responded to dissent not with dialogue, but with clampdowns, proscription, and violence.
The years that followed were characterized by cycles of resurgence and suppression. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Union operated under the shadow of military rule, its leaders sometimes branded as subversives, its activities curtailed or outlawed. Even after the return to democracy, the ethos of control did not vanish. University administrations, often mirroring the intolerance of the Nigerian political class, found in proscription and suspension convenient tools to silence the voices that challenged fee increments, poor living conditions, or opaque governance.
The 2017 suspension of the Students’ Union under President Ojo Aderemi epitomized this enduring antagonism. Students had dared to question, to demand accountability over the non-issuance of Identity Cards, and for that act of defiance, the Union was dissolved, bear in mind that it was this same year that the then Vice Chancellor, Prof. Idowu Olayinka had proscribed the students’ union, suspended the union executive and rusticated a student journalist, Kunle Adebajo. For two years, the student body was deprived of its constitutional voice, while its leaders faced disciplinary measures that many described as arbitrary. Though reinstated in 2019, the episode underscored the delicate reality: student democracy at Ibadan, like its national counterpart, exists at the mercy of those in power. A later court ruling in 2023, which overturned some of the punitive decisions, revealed not only the excesses of the university’s disciplinary machinery but also the continued relevance of the judiciary in defending students’ rights.
The recent fee protests of 2025 reveal how little has changed. With the economic crisis tightening its grip on families, Ibadan students mobilized under the banner of #FeesMustFall. The administration’s response was familiar: rustications, suspensions, and the branding of dissenters as unruly elements. Civil society and national student bodies condemned the action as a blatant attack on the constitutional freedoms of expression and assembly. Yet the authorities pressed forward, signaling that for every generation of Ibadan students, the fight for education is inextricably a fight for the right to dissent.
To study the history of the University of Ibadan Students’ Union is to uncover the anatomy of Nigerian politics in miniature. The oscillation between freedom and restriction, the contest between dialogue and repression, the invocation of “order” to justify the silencing of agitation, all mirror the nation’s broader democratic struggles. The Union, despite its interruptions, remains an institution of memory and defiance. Its martyrs and exiled leaders form part of a lineage that binds the past to the present, reminding us that the rights of students are not gifts but prizes wrested through constant vigilance.
In one collective voice and shared bewilderment, we are left to ask: where did it all change? How did the union that once embodied our strength come to stand against us? A student once said “Oh how Kunle Adepeju would weep!”.
It is no foreign knowledge that while the most recent fee protest erupted towards the end of Samson Tobiloba’s Host tenure, those who bore the harshest brunt were our very own UI’3. And now, in the aftermath, when interviewed, the current president, Odedele Covenant, left us wondering, are we truly still a union that recognizes and defends the students, or have we quietly slipped into the palms of those who trample upon our very existence?
The lore is simple: those who dare to question are not answered, but silenced, branded criminals of the law. But what is this law? How do we define a law that is unapologetically vague, projected to remain so, and weaponized against its very people? When the president could only stammer, claiming rights had been “misappropriated” and “misrepresented,” one cannot help but ask: did the constitution lie? Or must rights now be crossed out and hidden because they are deemed too sacred to practice?
The right to peaceful protest, the right to speak, the right to simply be, what are they worth if exercising them only earns you shackles? How then are students expected to carry out these rights without being bundled into silence?
The students deserve answers. Yet again, the president has deemed it unnecessary to explain, unnecessary to account for, unnecessary to stand with the very people whose voices make up the union. And then they wonder why students have begun to question the essence of unionism itself, why it exists, and for whom.
We now see that the struggles of heroes' past are mocked by today’s silence. The punishment of dissent has not ended, it grows stronger, more sophisticated, feeding on the complicity of a union that should be the very nucleus of resistance. When the supposed shield of the people begins to cooperate with their oppressors, denying the students both the power of knowledge and the right to open governance, then the future is no longer green. It is a sickly purple, bruising deeper and sharper with every passing moment. And for this cause, we need no lecture on how we might change our fate, the solution lies in our palms.
And so, the story circles back, not to an end, but to a beginning that has never quite ended. The University of Ibadan Students’ Union is not merely a structure, nor is it a title stamped upon a letterhead; it is memory, it is sacrifice, it is the unrelenting sound of voices that refused to be silenced. Yet today, those voices tremble, weakened by compromise and muffled by fear.
Still, history whispers to us: rights are never granted freely; they are seized, protected, and defended with vigilance. If yesterday’s martyrs could speak, they would remind us that silence is the slowest form of surrender, and indifference, the surest path to erasure. The purple bruises of today are warnings, bleeding across our future, demanding that this generation either rise to heal or sink into the comfort of chains disguised as peace.
Perhaps the most haunting question is not whether the Union has failed us, but whether we ourselves have grown too weary to demand more. The fate of student democracy at Ibadan has never rested in the mercy of administrators alone; it rests in the resolve of students who dare to dream of a freer tomorrow.
The solution, indeed, lies in our palms, not as a metaphor, but as a truth. The Union will be what the students make of it: a shield or a silence, a voice or noise. And to the person who said “posterity will remain unkind to those who fail the public” said nothing but the truth for the days watered down by unjust and blind governance will only lead to more potholes.
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