A lecturer at the Joseph Sarwuan Tarka University of Agriculture, Makurdi (JOSTUM) in Benue State, Dr Ichor Smart, who was accused of masterminding the abduction of the wife of Chairman of the institution’s Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), Susan Anyagh, has denied the allegations.
Smart, who was recently released after spending over a month in police detention, made this known in a statement on Friday, February 28, 2025.
He stated that the kidnapped allegations against him by the ASUU chairman’s wife was fabricated to silence him for calling on her husband to account for the funds meant for families of deceased JOSTUM lecturers.
Smart said: “A meeting of the ASUU JOSTUM Branch was slated to hold on the 5th December, 2024, on a Thursday morning, so I posted the dates of withdrawals, cheque numbers, amounts and names of the serial accredited perennial borrowers from the welfare account on the wider University whatsapp group ‘JOSTUM Community’ for the University community to see the stealing that has been going on.
“In the meeting Dr Anyagh announced that he was going to end posting of ASUU issues on University platforms other than ASUU. On the 7th December, 2024, a day after I was allegedly present at the scene of the kidnap of the Chairpersons wife calling kidnappers to kill her.
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“What a movie that has not been acted.We walk the streets and meet with most of the families of our deceased colleagues and remember our obligations to them as a people and our unfulfilled financial obligations as a union.
“If we choose to remain quiet in the face of this financial theft and mindless engulfment of naira and kobo by Anyagh and co then the humanity in us and our collective conscience is dead and must be questioned.”
Smart noted that Anyagh’s allegation that she saw him at the scene of her kidnap was “a hallucinated fabrication, a falsehood that she carelessly crafted in cahoots with her husband” and a few of other colleagues in the university to misinform the public and tarnish his hard earned image.
Smart stated that he had engagements in his village in Ikurav Tiev 2 in Katsina-Ala and was not close to Makurdi where the incident was said to have occurred.
“I couldn’t have duplicated myself to be at the scene of the imaginary kidnap of Mrs Anyagh and at the same be at the burial in my village on the same day, the distance from Makurdi to my village notwithstanding,” the lecturer said.
He, however, called on the Benue State Police Command to release the report of its investigation to the public.
The command’s spokesperson, Catherine Anene, has yet to speak on the development as of press time.
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