By Prof Olatunji Abanikannda
A Long-Awaited Announcement
On Wednesday, 9 September 2026, the Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr Gbenga Omotoso, announced that Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu had approved the appointment of Professor Ayodeji Olawunmi BADEJO (née Faji) as the tenth substantive Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University. She succeeds Professor Ibiyemi OLATUNJI-BELLO, whose five-year tenure, which began in September 2021, has now run its full course.
Professor Badejo, a Professor of Guidance and Counselling with a Master of Education and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Lagos, now assumes the leadership of an institution whose search for her had been anything but ordinary.
For those who have followed my sustained engagement with the governance of Lagos State University over the preceding months, the announcement is not simply news. It is the resolution that, provisional as all human resolutions are, of a contest between two visions of how a public university ought to choose its head: one governed by transparent criteria, numerical thresholds, and parity of standing among those who judge; the other content to let ambiguity do the work that clear rules were designed to prevent.
A Process Under Strain
The posts in my series has traced the strain that attended the LASU succession: an advertisement whose eligibility language spoke of ‘several years’ of post-professorial standing rather than a fixed and defensible number; a shortlist whose internal disparities raised more questions than the University’s own communications answered; and a Selection Committee whose composition invited scrutiny of whether the architecture of the search had been built to a predetermined conclusion rather than to the University’s stated ideals of merit and seniority.
None of these observations was made in malice, and none of the issues raised was controverted. They were made, as whistleblowing always must be made, in the conviction that an institution’s dignity survives only where its processes can bear examination.
It is a mark of institutional immaturity when management mistakes scrutiny for sabotage, and a mark of institutional courage when scrutiny is met not with retaliation but with correction. Nigeria’s universities have not always been spared the former. That Lagos State’s own machinery of government has, on this occasion, appeared to choose the latter course is itself the substance of this post.
A Government That Listened
There is a particular satisfaction, one this post does not take lightly, in watching a government decline to be captured by the preferences of an outgoing administration. Every succession carries within it the temptation for departing management to shape its own afterlife: to tilt a shortlist, to seed a panel, to write an advertisement loosely enough that a favoured name might slip through where a rigorous one would not.
Lagos State’s ultimate decision, arrived at through the Governor’s own constitutional prerogative of assent, is a reminder that the final word in these matters does not belong to those who are leaving, however energetically they may have laboured or politically connected to have it otherwise.
Responsiveness in governance is not a slogan; it is a discipline. It requires a government to hear complaint without flinching from it, to weigh contested processes against the plain text of enabling law, and to resist the easy path of ratifying whatever an outgoing management presents as a fait accompli. Whatever the precise deliberations behind Government House’s doors, the outcome announced on 9 September speaks, in my judgement, to a Governor and an administration unwilling to let a university’s future be quietly decided in a departing Vice-Chancellor’s final months.
The Flawless Emergence, Against All Odds
Professor Ayodeji BADEJO now inherits a university that needs, above all else, the restoration of confidence, among staff who have watched a search process unfold in public, among students who inherit whatever culture their leadership models, and among a Lagos public that has learned, sometimes painfully, to ask harder questions of its institutions than it once did.
That her emergence comes after months of contestation, after an advertisement drafted in language pliable enough to admit doubt, after a shortlist that drew open criticism, and after a panel (Senate Representatives) whose own standing was questioned, is precisely what makes it worth calling, without exaggeration, an emergence against the odds.
There is an old Yoruba counsel that the palm tree does not grow crooked by accident of ground alone; it is straightened, where it can be straightened, by the hands that tend it. Governance is such a tending. A university does not right itself by drama or by decree, but by the patient insistence of those inside and outside it that its rules mean what they say. If Professor Badejo’s appointment stands as evidence that Lagos State’s rules, in the end, meant what they said, then the University, and not any single actor within it, is the true beneficiary.
Conclusion
This post extends its congratulations to Professor Badejo and wishes her the wisdom of Solomon and the fortitude of Marcus Aurelius in the office she now assumes.
LASU’s recent history has not lacked for controversy; what it has lacked, more urgently, is stability built on legitimacy. It falls to the new Vice-Chancellor, and to a Governing Council and Lagos State Government now visibly attentive to the University’s affairs, to ensure that this moment of vindication becomes the foundation of a durable institutional renewal and not merely its highest point.
May I seize this opportunity to specially thank each and every member of the Governing Council and Senate Selection Committee, the Pro-Chancellor / Chairman and all members of the University Governing Council, the Chancellor, Lagos State University and more importantly the Visitor, His Excellency , Governor Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu for this peaceful transition, devoid of any untoward brouhaha, even in the eye of the storm.
Congratulations to the tens of thousands of readers of my posts, followers and the numerous people that tag others and share it.
I hereby formally rest this case and pray that Lagos State University would grow from glory to glory!
Thank you Mr. Governor for this gift!
