OAU students march on Ooni’s palace to protest fees increase

By SIKIRU AKINOLA

Distraught students of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife on Tuesday took their protest against the recently announced increase in fees to the palace of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade.

Though they could not get to speak with the monarch, palace chiefs, who received them promised to deliver their message.

Before retiring to the Ife palace, the protestors, who marched in their hundreds, had mounted barricades at the Gbongan junction, opposite the Oduduwa University, causing traffic snare at the ever busy route.

Travelers going to Abuja, Ondo, Lagos, Ibadan, Ekiti and other neigbouring towns were stranded as the students barricaded all the roads, thereby forcing the motorists to park their vehicles.

Led by the students' union president-elect, Isaac Ibikunle, the aggrieved students carried placard with inscriptions critical of the university management and the federal government as they sang solidarity songs to express their displeasure.

Among them were some post-graduate students of the university, whose payable fees have also been increased.

They chanted anti-management songs, saying that the increment is aimed at killing poor Nigerians whose standard of living have fallen abysmally.

One of the banners read: "Omole's increment is Boko-Haramic".

While explaining the reason for liking the university policy to that of the fundamentalist Boko Haram, Ibikunle, a part five Law student, said the only difference is that while the insurgents are killing and abducting innocent school children, thereby preventing them from being educated, the increment also has the potential of stopping indigent students from furthering their studies.

He said that after exploring all avenues to make the management see reason and reverse the new regime of fees, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. 'Tale Omole, only offered to cut N17, 000 from it.

"We'll not be destructive in our struggle because our aluta is scientific and humanistic," he noted.

Ibikunle implored all well-meaning Nigerians to prevail on the Federal Government and the University to reverse the fee, saying the protest became pertinent because ‘we are aware that the FG has in its plans to increase tuition fees in all higher institutions in the country, using Ife to test this unhumanistic policy’. "All Nigerian students should join the school", he pleaded.

The chairman of the Murtala Muhammed Post-Graduate Hall, Chris Falola, said he doubted if he would be able to complete his programme, adding that most of them came back for their master’s degree because of unemployment.

"How can someone who is jobless pay that outrageous amount", Falola asked.

One of the protesters described the action of the university management as tyrannical. "How can somebody like Prof. Omole who led a protest against anti-masses policies as an undergraduate, introduced such?”