A professor of accounting at the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Niger State, Hassan Ibrahim, has said his speech at the third annual lecture of the Bursary Department of the Federal University of Technology, Minna, never accused members of the National Assembly of bribery.
He said the title of his paper; “The Role of Accountants In Promoting Ethical Financial Practices In University System” did not in any way accuse the legislators.
In a statement yesterday, he said the paper which was divided into 19 power point units was professional and straight to the point, with more of academic rather than political consideration.
He said, “As a result, and shortly after the presentation and in a swift move, newspapers and blogs became awash with news stories on the above subject matter. Regrettably and most importantly, some of them chose to embrace sensationalism at the detriment of accuracy in their news reporting.
“Specifically, my attention was therefore drawn to lots of news captions where I was quoted to have mentioned that “members of the national Assembly demand bribe from universities to perform their oversight function”. In reality, I never mentioned that in the paper I delivered.”
He said as a professional accountant and an astute academic who knows what oversight function means, he could not have jumped into any social, political and or economic controversy without weighing the gravity of his utterances.
“I tried to draw the line between Nigerian universities, innovation and financial management and urged Nigerian universities to adopt innovative strategies to tackle the financial management challenges plaguing the Nigerian University System (NUS),” he added.
He said the lecture title underscored the importance of ethical stewardship in the effective utilisation of resources, to maintain stakeholder trust and safeguard the reputation of academic institutions, which was where he thought the misquotation came.
