Seventy lecturers in the University of Maiduguri have resigned their appointments following recent attacks by terror group Boko Haram on the university community and its staff in Nigeria’s northeast region.
The resignation of the lecturers, mostly professors, had affected research and learning in the university because some were specialists in their fields, said Dani Mamman, head of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the northeastern state of Borno.
“Usually, such exodus affects accreditation of some programs and courses,” Mamman, also a lecturer, told reporters last Sunday.
He said chief among the reasons the lecturers resigned their appointments was a recent attack on some of their colleagues by Boko Haram.
The terror group killed five of the university’s lecturers and held three others hostage, even up till now.
They were attacked during a collaborative work with the national oil corporation which embarked on oil exploration in the Lake Chad Basin two weeks ago.
That aside, suicide attacks on the university had increased since early this year.
A professor who was the director of veterinary at the university was among five people killed in an attack on the main campus by Boko Haram in January.
The admission figure of students had dropped since Boko Haram’s attacks started in 2009, Mamman noted.
On July 28, the Nigerian government said there was no plan to order a temporary closure of the University of Maiduguri located in the largest city in the northeast region in spite of the increase in attacks on the institution by Boko Haram.
In spite of the brutal murder of some staff of the higher learning institution and the general security situation in the region, the government said it did not want academic activities there to be truncated.
Rather, the government was willing to provide “necessary support” in ensuring that the security situation was under control, Mallam Adamu Adamu, the nation’s minister of education, said.
Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 and displaced 2.3 million people in its attacks since 2009.