Doctor Sherif Akande, a lecturer with the Cross River State University of Technology, Obubra campus was amongst the 125 dead people whose bodies were lowered into a mass grave by the authorities of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, UCTH, over the weekend.

Dr. Akande who was a lecturer in the Department of Fisheries and Wild Life of the school was said to have taken ill in 2011 and sought medical attention in the UCTH but did not recover and passed on and his body subsequently deposited in the Hospital’s mortuary but since then nobody came to claim his body. “All efforts to trace his relatives in Lagos where he said he came from failed; when a delegation was sent to Lagos, his last known relative was said to have died some months in an auto crash before Akande” a colleague who prefers anonymity said.

Our source who is a close friend of Akande said he often told him that he came from Lagos state to Cross River State for the mandatory one year national youth service corps some twenty years ago and was posted to Yakurr in the Central Senatorial District of the state but after passing out of service he stayed back in Ugep “because he was in love with the place and the state government eventually offered him employment as a classroom teacher and he lived in Ugep his adopted home from where he was employed by the Cross River University of Technology to teach Fisheries after he acquired a masters in Agriculture”.

Our source said during his sojourn in Ugep, Akande had relationships with two ladies and “each of those ladies gave birth to a child for him but he never married any of them formally and never took any of his kids or the women to his home in Lagos and none of his relatives visited him until his death”.

When CrossRiverWatch visited the Fisheries department of the University of Technology Obubra, all the offices were locked because of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, strike but a non academic staff, Mr. Desmond Ilori said he knew the man well and he was a “jolly good fellow and made friends with everybody but with the circumstance of his demise nobody can now say proper farewell to him- what a life”.

Three weeks ago, the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital in paid announcements on the Cross River Broadcasting Corporation signed by the Corporate Affairs Officer, Mrs. Solomon announced the names of 125 bodies unclaimed from the hospital’s mortuary between 2006 and 2011 and gave the relatives of such dead bodies two weeks to come forward and claim the bodies or forget about them as they would be interred in a mass grave and “the UCTH will not be liable for to any unclaimed dead body after the two weeks”
READ MORE: http://www.crossriverwatch.com/2013/08/university-of-calabar-teaching-hospital-buries-don-in-mass-grave/