By Usani Odum
![](https://thenigerialawyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/idrinstitute.png")
In 1869, Ms. Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois bar exam in the U.S. but was denied admission into the legal profession solely because she was a woman. She challenged that decision by the state of Illinois up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) upheld the denial. In his concurring opinion, Justice Joseph Bradley infamously wrote that “the paramount destiny and mission of a woman is to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” adding that women’s “timidity and delicacy” rendered them unfit for many civil occupations.
Although some states in the U.S. began admitting women to the bar before the Supreme Court ruled on Bradwell’s case, Illinois waited nearly two decades, finally opening the profession to women in 1890. Bradwell lost, but her fight sparked global gender-equality movements. In Africa, this momentum contributed to the adoption of the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa, (the Maputo Protocol) in 2003. The Protocol is celebrated as one of the most progressive treaties advancing women’s reproductive rights, and the type of education that will guarantee them “substantive equality” with men.
In 2023, as the world marked the 20th anniversary of the Maputo Protocol, female law students of the University of Calabar (Unical) took to the streets to protest what they called “suffocation” from sexual harassment by the Dean Prof. Cyril Ndifon, which is denying them access to education. This was not Ndifon’s first scandal in the faculty: in 2015, Ndifon faced rape allegations involving a 19-year-old law student. The facts of that case, which would normally have led to his immediate dismissal from the school, are summarized as follows:
In August 2015, Ndifon scheduled a Saturday test for fourth-year Jurisprudence students of the faculty. While they wrote, he proceeded to the 19-year-old female student, seized her scripts and tore it up without reason. While on her way home in tears, Ndifon reportedly accosted her in his car and lured her back to his office, where he reportedly offered her the option to rewrite the test. What transpired between the two inside Ndifon’s private office culminated in that rape allegation. In response to the scandal, Ndifon was temporarily removed as Dean, while the substance of the case quickly added to the ever-growing number of unresolved sexual and gender-based violence against students in Nigerian Universities. The case also highlighted Nigeria’s broader failures to address sexual harassment and gender-based violence against women and girls in Nigeria at large.
As a former student during Ndifon’s first term as Dean, I recall him as a predatory, unruly and disruptive little man, who has an unsettling interest in students’ private lives. He maintained informants in every class, often rewarded with academic favors, and who reported on classmates’ gossip or affairs to him. Instead of dwelling on mentoring and helping students succeed into lawyers, Ndifon turned his professorial ears into a cesspit of little talk about student’s private lives. He frequently summoned students over trivial matters, threatening their graduation, and carried out most of those threats repeatedly. I received a few of those calls myself.
Without resolving the rape allegation against Ndifon, UniCal’s then Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Zana Akpagu, recalled him from suspension in 2017. About two years later, under Prof. Florence Obi, the first female and current Vice Chancellor of UniCal, Ndifon was reappointed Dean to the shock of the alumni of the school. During his second coming, Ndifon’s well-known debauchery continued on a grander scale. It was during this second coming that the female students of the faculty took to the streets to protest the unabating harassment in August 2023. Again, Ndifon was suspended, but this time, an investigative panel was set up to investigate the allegations. To describe the findings of that panel as ‘putrefying’ would be, at best, a gross underrepresentation of the severity of the rot in that faculty.
For context, allegations of sexual harassment against Ndifon have plagued UniCal’s law faculty for about three decades. Stories of female students enduring abuse span generations, with some graduates’ children later recounting similar experiences. While acting in loco parentis, Ndifon reportedly treated female students’ bodies as playthings. But the report of the panel revealed more: levies collected from students for law journals were squandered; unqualified students with incomplete results were mobilized for law school, while qualified candidates were dropped; students with first degree in religious studies and unrelated fields were admitted to the law degree program through direct entry, in clear violations of the admission requirements; female students who rebuffed his advances repeatedly failed law courses in perpetuity. In fact, the investigative panel had to order immediate summer exams for one of the victims as an interim measure, to enable her to proceed to law school while the panel’s report was still being concluded.
Ndifon’s reign of terror extended beyond students. The investigative panel heard that fellow lecturers who opposed him as Dean were sidelined. Course allocations favored loyalty over expertise, and experienced professors lost their courses. A female lecturer who signed an online petition calling for his probe during the first rape scandal, was blocked from defending her PhD indefinitely, while younger, loyal researchers completed theirs in record two years, even amid the COVID-19 lockdown!
While the UniCal investigative panel exposed the rampant roguery and debauchery in the law faculty, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) filed criminal charges against Ndifon at the Federal High Court. And for the next 23 months, the legal and academic community followed the shocking proceedings detailing how a dean of law traded grades for sexual gratification, solicited nudes from vulnerable students with his phone, and abused his powers in how administered the faculty. Public outrage peaked when Ndifon argued in open court that his relationship with his diploma student was “consensual,” ignoring the clear power imbalance, duty of care, and trust inherent in his position.
Yesterday, the Federal High Court thankfully convicted Ndifon and sentenced him to five years for sexual harassment and abuse of power against the same diploma student, finally removing him from the reach of innocent students in that school forever. Yet, it is crucial to underscore the fact that for about 30 years, the university knowingly ignored his predations while he plundered lives of young girls. As we make a post-mortem on the eclipse of such a prohibitively disgraceful academic career, we must also underscore that all Ndifon’s perfidious excesses were well known in the university community. But successive administrations looked the other way, while the man plundered the bodies and destinies of young girls like a rebel soldier in armed conflict.
UniCal failed the girl child for many years, when it failed to provide safe spaces for victims to speak up against their abusers.
UniCal failed the girl child when it recalled Ndifon the first time despite the controversial weekend tests, the torn scripts, and forcing a student to rewrite the test in his office. All of these were clear uncontested breaches of extant university rules, requiring no police action to address.
For many years, the University of Calabar failed the girl child!
Usani Odum is a Transitional Justice expert. He writes from South Sudan.
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