The story of Tansian University has never been a simple narrative of a visionary Catholic priest founding an institution to uplift the poor and intellectually hungry. It is instead a labyrinth of disputed legacies, contested ecclesiastical authority, bureaucratic manoeuvres, and a slow, corrosive erosion of the original ideals upon which the university was built. In the years since the death of its founder, Very Rev. Msgr. Prof. John Bosco Akam, the institution has become the epicentre of a remarkable struggle—part moral, part legal, and wholly political—culminating in what now appears to be a deliberate attempt to commandeer the university and rewrite its history. At the centre stands Rev. Fr. E. S. C. Obiorah, whose magical ascendance from the university external lawyer to the Chancellor with increasingly unrestrained authority over Tansian University has prompted questions about his fidelity to the founder’s explicit Last Will, the integrity of the institution’s governance, and the troubling opacity with which sweeping decisions have been executed.
To understand the magnitude of what is unravelling, one must return to the beginning—when Msgr. Akam, a cleric of abundant vision and uncompromising dedication, founded the university under the auspices of the Missionary Servants of the Church, later known as the Missionary Sons of Tansi. This was not an administrative convenience nor a cosmetic designation; it was a deliberate ecclesiastical act. The founder Willed the university to this congregation—his congregation—entrusting to its Board of Directors the solemn duty of safeguarding the institution’s mission. The board, indisputably, comprised Akam himself, Dr. Peter Ejikeme, Paulinus Nwankwo, and a handful of mission-driven collaborators. No moment exists in the annals of the university’s history where Akam appointed a new board for MSC/MST or ceded the congregation’s proprietorial rights to the Diocese of Ekwulobia or any other ecclesiastical body. When death eventually claimed all other board members, Dr. Peter Ejikeme remained the sole surviving custodian of the founder’s mandate.
The National Universities Commission (NUC), the regulator of tertiary education, continued to affirm that Tansian University’s licence was issued to Missionary Servants of the Church.
Recalled that in 2022, when—pursuant to the same NUC licence that anchored the university’s identity—a corporate body, Tansian University Onitsha/Umunya Ltd/Gte, was registered at the Corporate Affairs Commission. It was struck down by regulatory scrutiny. The NUC reminded the university that a private university is not a profit-driven enterprise and therefore cannot operate as a limited liability company. At that critical juncture, Missionary Servants of the Church, the original proprietorial body, was brought forward as the founder organisation.
Even when the congregation, under internal spiritual evolution, metamorphosed into the Missionary Sons of Tansi, the NUC did not accept a name change because the procedural steps were not followed. To remedy this, Msgr. Akam dispatched his emissaries to Abuja: first, to ascertain from the Corporate Affairs Commission whether any other organisation bore the new name, and second, to establish the legitimacy of the congregation to obtain Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering (SCUML) certification from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). What was uncovered, however, was a saga of forgery and clandestine subterfuge. Mr Innocent Ukeh—whose proximity to the founder ought to have bred fidelity—had secretly registered Missionary Sons of Iwene Tansi Congregation and opened an unfamiliar bank account at Zenith Bank Ekwulobia. When confronted, he presented Akam with a forged certificate bearing the founder’s falsified signature. Shocked, Akam ordered the immediate closure of the illicit account and the registration. The breach was not merely administrative; it was an early tremor of the present institutional quakes.
By 2019, as Akam sought to formalise a new board for MST (the proprietor of Tansian University), the NUC insisted that appointees must undergo clearance by the DSS. This requirement was never completed before the 2020 Covid19 pandemic, and then founder’s worsening health intervened and ultimately ended his life in February 2021. In the years immediately following his death, an opportunistic vacuum emerged, and into that vacuum stepped individuals whose ambitions diverged sharply from Akam’s testament.
It is against this historical and moral background that the present controversies surrounding Rev. Fr. Obiorah must be weighed. In an official letter dated December 7, 2024, addressed to the NUC in response to a warning from the Commission, Obiorah asserted that Tansian University has never in its history experienced governance challenges. This pronouncement, grand in tone yet fragile in truth, contradicts years of documented turmoil, including internal disputes, contested appointments, legal battles, unauthorised land claims, and a protracted crisis of legitimacy. He further characterises all ownership-related petitions as “frivolous” attempts by “rapacious individuals,” yet omits that several of these petitioners stand on the authority of the founder’s legally binding Will and ecclesiastically recognised congregational rights.
The argument advanced by Obiorah—that the incorporation of Tansian University by CAC in 2022 under CAMA as a company limited by guarantee supersedes the spiritual, legal, and institutional identity of the university—is, at best, a selective reading of the law and, at worst, a calculated attempt to sever the university from its founders. The suggestion that the CAC “compelled” the appointment of certain directors, many of whom are clerics from diocesan structures unconnected to Akam’s congregation, is a proposition that not only drifts into improbability but directly contradicts the regulatory caution issued by NUC when the corporate entity was first presented. Even ecclesiastical authorities have publicly repudiated the idea that the Diocese of Ekwulobia or the Diocese of Awka has inherited proprietorship of Tansian University by virtue of this corporate restructuring. Ownership of a university—particularly a faith-based university—does not transpose automatically through incorporation, and it certainly does not migrate to diocesan administration absent an ecclesiastical decree, founder’s directive, or canonical transfer. None of these conditions exist.
Even more disconcerting is the reconstitution of a Board of Trustees under Obiorah’s watch. The newly listed trustees—men and women of varying repute—exist outside the framework laid down by the founder. Their emergence appears less like an organic evolution of the institution’s governance and more like an engineered replacement of the legitimate custodians whose rights derive from the founder’s Will. For a university whose identity was built upon missionary consecration and spiritual fidelity, this sudden pivot toward a diocesan-dominated board is not only incongruous but raises the spectre of a carefully orchestrated appropriation.
Land controversies further erode the credibility of the narrative Obiorah presents to the NUC. His assertion that land disputes have been conclusively resolved in favour of the university collapses when examined against the persistent legal objections by landowners, including Ranent Industries, whose property at the Oba campus was subject to a consent judgment requiring the university to pay rent. The claim that the property belongs to the university has been publicly and legally contested, with the benefactors themselves issuing open denials. This is not a matter of trivial misunderstanding but a deep-seated conflict between fact and presentation—a conflict that continues to attract regulatory concern from the NUC.
What emerges, after peeling back the layers of bureaucratic posturing and ecclesiastical rhetoric, is a picture of a university whose founding purpose has been gradually eclipsed. Fragments of the founder’s legacy have been repurposed into instruments of institutional control. The original proprietors—Missionary Servants of the Church, later the Missionary Sons of Tansi—have been rendered increasingly invisible, their rights overwritten by procedural technicalities that Akam never sanctioned. And Fr. Obiorah, assuming the mantle of Chancellor and central authority, appears to be navigating the institution away from its missionary genesis and into the orbit of diocesan influence that the founder neither sought nor approved.
The struggle for Tansian University is no longer merely administrative. It is a moral contestation over the fate of a dream. It is the clash between a founder’s sacred trust and an emergent power structure that seems determined to redefine the university’s soul. It is also a cautionary tale—a reminder that institutions built on the shoulders of visionaries can, in their vulnerability, become prey to opportunistic reinventions when guardianship becomes fractured.
Only a thorough regulatory review, full transparency, and a return to the foundational documents—the founder’s Will, the original NUC licence, and the congregational constitution—can restore clarity to Tansian University’s embattled identity. Until these truths are reasserted, the institution will remain suspended in a state of contested legitimacy, its mission diluted, its future uncertain, and its founder’s legacy caught in the crossfire of a struggle he never foresaw, yet one that now demands the forceful reclamation of his unequivocal intentions.
*Chidipeters Okorie was the former Public Relations Officer (PRO), Tansian University, Umunya and Special Assistant to the Founder and Chancellor, Very Rev. Msgr. Prof. John Bosco Akam (blessed Memories)
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