Prof. Festus Iyayi, a key member of ASUU's National Executive Council who was also a former president of the union is dead. He died Tuesday morning in a car crash on his way to Kano to participate in tomorrow’s National Executive Council Meeting which is expected to declare an end to the over 4-month strike.
Witnesses said Mr. Iyayi, 66, died along the the Lokoja-Abuja highway in an accident involving the the convoy of Kogi state Governor, Idris Wada. One of the pilot cars in the governor’s convoy reportedly rammed into the vehicle in which Mr. Iyayi and other activists were travelling, killing him instantly, witnesses said.
But the Special Adviser to the Governor, Jacob Edi, said it was untrue that it was the governor’s pilot vehicle that hit Mr. Iyayi’s car.
Iyayi was president of ASUU from 1986 to 1988.He was born in 1947, in Ugbegun, Ishan, Edo State. He started his education at Annuciation Catholic College in the old Bendel state popularly known as ACC finishing in 1966, in 1967 he went to Government College Ughelli graduating in 1968. In that same year he was a zonal winner in a Kenedy Essay Competition organised by the United States Embassy in Nigeria.
He left the shores of Nigeria to pursue his higher education, obtaining a M.Sc in Industrial Economics from the Kiev Institute of Economics, in the former USSR and then his Ph.D from the University of Bradford, England. In 1980, he went back to Benin and became a lecturer in the Department of Business Administration at the University of Benin.
A well known author, with four books to his credit (Violence, The Contract, Heroes, and Awaiting Court Martial), Prof. Iyayi won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature for his book Heroes in 1988.
May his soul rest in peace.
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