STUDENTS of the University of Lagos went on the rampage recently, following a profusion of bedbugs in their hostels. Their complaint to the school authorities for a remedy for several months fell on deaf ears. Having reached the limit of their patience, in the wee hours of September 27, they invaded the homes of principal officers of the university in protest, locked the two entrance gates, on which they hung some tattered, bug-infested mattresses. What an eyesore!
But who will blame the students for this stormy gyration? Their action was the second in quick succession after the one triggered by Oluchi Anekwe’s electrocution on September 8. A prospective first class accounting student, she reportedly died due to negligence by the UNILAG Medical Centre. She was rushed to the clinic alive, but medical personnel were said to have demanded her identity card before attending to her, despite her unconscious state. No action could be more irrational.
Any juxtaposition of the displayed ragged mattresses with the hoary denial of the students’ bedbugs claim by the university’s Deputy Registrar on Information, Olagoke Oke, who said that “the UNILAG management replaces hostel mattresses at the end of every session,” would conclude that he was just hiding behind a finger. Some students said those mattresses were bought in 2012, and not 2014, which Oke’s defence implied.
The two embarrassing episodes are avoidable in institutions where the administrators are alive to their responsibilities. Bedbug infestation is a product of a filthy environment, which students’ halls of residence have become in virtually all of our public universities. When hostels are overcrowded, lack water and toilets; and students prepare their meals with personal stoves, instead of schools providing well-run canteen services; the UNILAG bedbug narrative cannot be totally unexpected.
Although UNILAG authorities have promised to fumigate the hostels and buy new mattresses as soon as the students conclude their semester exams and proceed on vacation, it is a responsibility they ought not to be coerced into discharging by a scandal. Oluchi would have been alive today had there been efficient porters or personnel of the works department, who regularly monitored the environment or the electricity facility that snapped and fell on the deceased. The authorities’ escapist assertion that the electricity provider, and not the school, should be blamed is irritating.
These disquieting episodes draw our collective attention to the condition under which students study in our universities. Quality education cannot be guaranteed; and the wider society is the worse for it. Every year, the situation degenerates without the political authorities showing concern about the rot or doing something to address the challenge.
In 2013, the report of the Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public Universities was presented to the Federal Executive Council meeting on November 1. Its attention was drawn to the fact that “students cannot get accommodation, (and) where they get, they are packed like sardines in a tiny room,” and have “no light (electricity) and water in hostels, classrooms and laboratories,” among other inadequacies. The matter ended there.
It was this decay of basic amenities that caused the death of four students of Nasarawa State University, Keffi, in 2013, as they were shot by soldiers mobilised to quell their riot. A situation where students use sachet water to cook, dry-clean and bathe; where hoodlums often invade female hostels to rape them, as a result of lack of perimeter fences separating academic institutions from their immediate neighbourhoods, calls into question the administrative competence of university Governing Councils and vice-chancellors of institutions where these exist.
While we acknowledge that our universities are poorly funded, we are at a loss as to why some of their administrators cannot even provide students with borehole water, which ordinary Nigerians provide for themselves in the absence of public water system. That many students defecate in cellophane bags in their hostels and throw them out of the windows like shot put, as widely reported, shows they now live outside the bounds of decency.
Redeeming this unsavoury situation requires a mix of policy actions, rededication to duty of university administrators and active students’ unionism that would hold authorities to account over welfare matters. Unfortunately, we have VCs that are now more of businessmen and contractors than administrators. This is why reports of visitations to most universities evince financial recklessness and misappropriation of funds.
A former Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Peter Okebukola, was therefore right when he said, “Universities need to be in the hands of managers who can run the institutions efficiently and prudentially manage resources. Such managers include councils, vice-chancellor and his or her Senate.”
It is now too obvious that admission of students in excess of the carrying capacity of each university is the foundation of this social malady bedevilling our university system. It is driven purely by the profit motive. This drift should be arrested if the quality of the products being churned out annually is to be enhanced. As a result, oversight of the activities of universities should not be limited to the academic sphere, as currently being performed by the NUC.
We can control these bizarre social affairs in the universities: having toilets that are overstretched to the point of not being used; or 10 or more students using a room meant for two or four students, with regular inspections by government health officers and sanctions imposed on errant school authorities. Let there be a benchmark in this area as it is in the academic sphere.
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