lasuconscience
Beyond the Students’ Executive Council, the machinery of LASUSU runs on two arms that rarely get the spotlight the Presidency or the Social Directorate command, but whose work shapes the Union just as much: the Students’ Parliamentary Council (SPC) and the Students’ Judicial Council (SJC). One makes the laws and checks the executive; the other interprets and enforces them. This session, both arms found themselves at the centre of moments that said more about their character than any press release could.
THE 36TH LASUSU SPC
The LASUSU constitution charges the SPC to “serve as checks and balances on the SEC on all union matters.” It is the legislative arm, the body meant to pass bills, scrutinize the executive, and give students a functioning system of oversight, headed by the Speaker, alongside a Deputy Speaker, Clerk, Chief Whip, Under Secretary and Sergeant-at-Arms.
Unlike previous sessions, where this report card could point to a clerical conference, a National Parliamentary Summit, or an inaugural lecture as evidence of legislative activity, the 36th SPC under Speaker Rt. Hon. Ogunbiyi Akorede Joshua leaves behind no comparable public record of bills passed, programmes hosted, or oversight exercised on behalf of students. If such work happened, it did not reach the students it was meant to serve. What did reach students, instead, was a controversy that will likely define this SPC’s legacy far more than any quiet legislative session could have.
On Saturday, 8th November, a broadcast went out from the office of the Chairman, House Committee on Information, Strategy and Special Duties, Comr. Gabriel Theresa, addressed to “all accredited media organizations.” In it, the House declared that any media organization wishing to observe or publish coverage of parliamentary sittings would first need to submit a formal request to the Committee for approval, citing Standing Order 25 of the LASUSU Constitution, and warning that any media house that failed to comply “shall be held liable for violating constitutional provisions.”
The problems with this directive are not subtle. LASU Conscience and other campus media organizations are accredited under Lagos State University itself, not under LASUSU, a Union body attempting to license the press that covers it is, on its face, an overreach bordering on censorship. The broadcast cited unspecified “prior instances where media outlets published unverified or defamatory information,” yet offered no evidence, no examples, and tellingly no record of legal action ever taken over these alleged defamations. A House that felt genuinely wronged by false reporting had a remedy available to it in the courts; it chose a blanket gag order instead. Real accountability is not accountability that can be pre-approved by the party being held accountable, and a press that must seek a legislature’s blessing before it can report on that legislature is not a free press at all, a point LASU Conscience made directly to the SPC at the time, grounding its refusal to comply in Sections 22 and 39(1) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which guarantee both press freedom and freedom of expression.
That this directive originated from the office of a Chairman, and under the authority of a Speaker, who are themselves students of Communication and Media Studies, only sharpens the irony. Whatever the intention behind it, the episode left students with a clear picture of an SPC more interested in controlling how it was covered than in doing the legislative work that would have made coverage of it worth reading in the first place.
The SPC’s fingerprints were also visible, less directly but no less significantly, in the transition process that ushered in the 37th administration’s electoral bodies. The transition sitting, the legislative process by which the outgoing SPC appoints the Independent Electoral Committee, the Independent Petition Committee, and the Independent Audit Committee for the incoming session, is supposed to produce genuinely independent oversight of LASUSU elections. What students have observed instead, session after session, is a pattern: faculty-level “political structures” lobbying for preferred nominees behind closed doors, and a curious continuity in which the Speaker’s own faculty keeps producing the IEC’s leadership. This session was no exception, Speaker Ogunbiyi Akorede himself hails from the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, the same faculty as the newly appointed 37th LASUSU-IEC chairperson. Whether this is coincidence or evidence of the “godfatherism” many students already suspect, the SPC that presides over this process has done little to dispel the perception that LASUSU’s transition sittings answer to faculty “citadels” before they answer to students.
The incoming SPC inherits a legislative arm that students currently associate more with controversy than with lawmaking. The lesson is straightforward: an SPC’s legitimacy rests on the bills it passes and the transparency of the processes it presides over, not on its ability to control who gets to report on either. The next SPC should spend far less energy managing its press coverage and far more energy earning press coverage worth having.
THE 36TH LASUSU SJC
The constitution charges the SJC to “regulate all judicial activities of the union” the body meant to be the final word on disputes, the protector of students’ rights, and, ideally, the first port of call when something goes wrong on campus.
For most of this session, that mandate existed largely on paper. At inauguration, the newly elected SJC promised to be visible, active, and accessible, the office students would run to before they ran to a blogger. That promise did not survive the session. For long stretches, few students could name a single member of the Council, let alone point to a case it had publicly handled. An office whose entire value proposition is trust and visibility spent much of its tenure being neither seen nor trusted.
Two developments complicate that picture, however, and deserve to be weighed fairly.
The first was the SJC’s quiet involvement in the chaos surrounding the Nigerian Association of Science Students (NASS-LASU) election, which descended into disorder following the disqualification of presidential aspirant Comrade Taiwo Oluwadamilare (“Omoba”) amid disputed allegations tied to an earlier suspension. Students questioned why the faculty election proceeded at all while a matter connected to it was still pending before the LASUSU High Court, and the confusion that followed, an omitted candidate’s name on the ballot, an IEC official allegedly seen tampering with a ballot box, and eventual physical confrontations that forced the Dean of Student Affairs to step in and postpone the election, is precisely the kind of dispute the judicial arm exists to resolve. That the matter reached the LASUSU High Court at all shows the machinery still functions when called upon, even if students rarely hear about it until something has already gone wrong.
The second, and by far the more consequential, development was the establishment of a permanent LASUSU High Court within the Students’ Union Arcade, a genuine institutional achievement. For years, “the LASUSU High Court” was a phrase many students had heard without ever knowing what it meant or where it sat; judicial proceedings borrowed space at the Faculty of Law’s Moot Court, with no home of its own. Under the leadership of Hon. Justice Alabi Abdulsalam, and grounded in Part 3 of the LASUSU constitution, the SJC converted an existing conference room into a dedicated courtroom, giving the judiciary the same institutional standing the SEC and SPC have long enjoyed with their own conference room and Hallowed Chambers respectively.
What the new court actually does deserves to be spelled out, because most students still don’t know. According to the Registrar of the LASUSU High Court, its jurisdiction covers civil disputes between students; election disputes and breaches of contract among them, but excludes criminal matters and disputes that fall outside the university community, such as a landlord-tenant disagreement, which remains a Welfare Directorate matter. The court is not reserved for law students; any LASU student can institute proceedings by approaching the Legal Director, who can help source representation from called-to-Bar members of the Students Advocacy Association or eligible law students. Perhaps most significantly, student leaders are not automatically shielded from being sued, while officials enjoy immunity for actions taken strictly within their official capacity, personal conduct outside that scope can still be brought before the court.
This is exactly the kind of information the SJC promised, at inauguration, to put directly in front of students and largely failed to, until an outlet other than its own had to explain it. The court’s existence is a genuine credit to this administration’s judiciary; the fact that most LASUites are only learning what it does from a media report, rather than from the SJC itself, is the same old failure in a new building.
Taken together, this SJC leaves behind one significant institutional achievement, one instance of the judiciary functioning as intended when a real crisis demanded it, and a broken promise of visibility that overshadowed both. The incoming SJC should treat the new High Court as a foundation, not a finish line, publicizing what it does, who sits on it, and how students can actually use it, so that the next time a NASS-LASU-style crisis erupts, students already know where to turn instead of finding out after the fact.
Two arms, two very different stories, but a shared thread: both possessed real institutional capacity this session, a legislature that could pass bills, a judiciary that built itself a courtroom and both let students discover far more about their missteps than about their mandates.
And with that, this report card closes. Across three instalments, one picture has held steady from the Presidency down to the Parliament: the 36th LASUSU administration was not short on capacity. It negotiated fares, launched courts, hosted debates, organised trade fairs, and put on the pageants and pitches this campus has come to expect. What it could not consistently do was finish what it started, tell students the truth while it was still happening, or account for a naira once it left their hands. A shuttle fare negotiated but never enforced. A prize purse announced but never paid. A statement of account promised by the constitution but never published, for a third administration running. A press asked to seek permission before it could tell the truth. These are not eight or nine unrelated failures. They are one failure, repeated in eight or nine offices.
To the 37th LASUSU administration now settling into these same offices: you are inheriting more than seats and titles. You are inheriting a student body that has learned, session after session, exactly how far a press release can be stretched before it stops meaning anything. That is not a burden to resent. It is a bar already set for you and this time, it should not take an editorial to clear it.
LASU Conscience will be watching, as we always have. For truth and fact.
Akojede Oluwadamilola, Deputy Editor-In-Chief, LASU Conscience
