Former and Current Students Say Law Prof. Yangien Ornguga, Benue State University State Commissioner Nominee, Is a Psychopath!!!

[Okey Iheduru]

The Governor of Benue State recently nominated a law professor at Benue State University for a commissioner position.

 However, what should have been a routine announcement has sparked a firestorm online. Former and current students of the professor, Dr. Yangien Ornguga ( inset is his picture), have taken to social media to air disturbing testimonies about his alleged abuse of power, emotional cruelty, and academic tyranny.

The professor’s record as a lecturer has come under intense scrutiny, with dozens of firsthand accounts describing a pattern of victimization, deliberate academic sabotage, and a toxic teaching style that many claim destroyed the futures of promising students.

One particularly compelling account came from Karen Bitto, a former student and daughter of a professor at the same university. Bitto wrote:

“I started with a first-class CGPA from my 100 level until 200 level second semester when Ornguga gave me a carryover. My father, Prof. Bitto, had to intervene and personally work with other lecturers in the Faculty of Law to get my scripts released from Ornguga’s custody and re-marked. Three different lecturers, including an external examiner, reviewed my script and awarded me an A, but to conceal the obvious victimization, a B was recorded instead.

That singular incident cost me my first class,

There are others like Busy Brain and Chekwube, all of us top of our class, who ended up with 2:1s simply because of him,

It’s cruel to dismiss our complaints as laziness when we were the best in our sets and ended up with broken records because of one man." (https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D8Gcn2LrL/)

Another deeply emotional testimony came from a Yoruba student who believed he was targeted because of his ethnicity, until he discovered a much darker truth:

“I failed his course multiple times despite working hard, something as trivial as misspelling his name was used against me,

After finally passing, he still withheld my long essay for three years. My supervisor had cleared me, yet I couldn’t graduate or go to law school. I spiraled into depression, I stopped going home, I drifted through life watching my peers thrive. Only in 2018 did we find out he had hidden my project among papers from the 1995 or ’97 set; it wasn’t tribalism, it was pure cruelty.He did it because he could.Today, I hold no personal grudge, but if Ornguga is given more power, many more will suffer; he has no trace of compassion."

A third student’s testimony paints a picture of a man who not only enjoys failing students but also boasts about it publicly:

“Every student from the Castle in Gold knows Dr. Ornguga, he is famous, not for brilliance, but for bragging, ‘I will fail you and heaven will not fall,’He once told us that on a bad day, he lightens his mood by failing students, he laughed about it,I was one of four students who received academic excellence awards at a faculty dinner in 2016,Weeks later, three of us, including Karen Bitto and Busy Brain, had our results inexplicably ruined in his courses,

It wasn’t coincidence, when I confronted him about my E grade, he smiled like a man who knew exactly what he was doing. After submitting a formal complaint, I was threatened, lecturers warned me I wouldn’t survive the fallout. Eventually, I withdrew the complaint, not because it wasn’t valid, but because I feared for my academic future,

He prevailed, he always does, unless something changes."

These are not isolated incidents. More than 200 students have come forward with similar stories of arbitrary failure, emotional abuse, and intimidation. Many accuse the professor of turning personal grudges into academic punishment, of using his power to ruin lives rather than shape them.

And while the nomination for a commissioner role is meant to be a promotion, many students see it as a welcome escape, for themselves.

“His nomination is a blessing to the university community,” one former student wrote, “Let him go, let him join his kind in politics and leave students to heal.” (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=4617175375175359&set=a.1400756380150624)

Dr. Ornguga may be the focus now, but the uproar reveals something much deeper, a toxic culture in Nigerian academia. Many lecturers, perhaps even most, are not educators but traumatized individuals misusing their authority to harm others. 

They wield the power of grades like weapons, often unchecked by accountability or transparency. They fail not to instruct, but to dominate. They are not mentors, but gatekeepers of suffering.

Let’s say it plainly, many lecturers in Nigerian universities are psychopaths, not in the clinical sense, but in their absolute lack of empathy, joy in others’ pain, and obsessive need for control. And they pass these traumas down from one generation of students to the next, unchecked, unchallenged, and often rewarded.

Until this culture is addressed, through reform, accountability, and student protection systems, universities will remain breeding grounds for broken dreams and institutional cruelty.

It is time to confront the truth. It is time to protect students.

Mctuval Nwoko 

* This is the first time I am seeing former students toe this path against their  lecturer!

Okey C. Iheduru

e-mail: okeyi...@gmail.com