On the morning of Sunday April 29,2018 I embarked on a journey to Obafemi Awolowo University the famed ‘Great Ife’, accompanying a friend that was resuming as a fresh student in the university. In recent times the university among other federal universities has being in the news for the negative reasons starting from increment in fees, students protests over lack of basic social amenities like water and electricity among other inadequacies. I couldn’t wait to get to Ife to see things for myself.
The first sign we got that the school had deteriorated greatly was the long process involved in getting hostel clearance for the students. They had to queue in the hot sun while waiting for the non zealous staffs to attend to them, the process as witnessed at the Mozambique hostel to say the least was inhumane as the students went through a long process of hostel verification, which quite frankly was redundant considering the school had a robust online registration process and students are forced to use it or receive fines. But that was nothing compared to the state of the hostel, the grounds had been allowed to grow out into unkempt shrubland, and the hostel itself was decrepit and hadn’t received any sort of renovation in a long time.
To further illustrate just how much system collapse has occurred in the University, I noticed posters all across the hostel that appealed to parents of new and returning students to ‘adopt’ a room by renovating it with a new coat of paint and tiling for the floors. According to the notices, the University insists that it is requesting this so that the students can ‘live better’. This begs the question, what has the Federal government been doing to improve these facilities over time as these hostels are as old as the University, the decision of the management to resort to help is a confirmation that government has not been proactive enough in funding the critical infrastructures in this and other universities across the country.
What about the rooms? The rooms are in a deplorable state , the only word to use in Nigerian parlance is manageable, the walls both exterior and interior are not painted, also the toilet facilities are not well kept as the students have resort to the usage of mobile potties to dispose their body wastes. The state of the accommodation at Mozambique hostel is poor as seen in other nearby hostels except the Alumni hostel which I learnt was renovated by the University old students.
Those saddled with the responsibilities of fixing these public universities are enjoined as a matter of urgency to salvage the situation at OAU and other public universities, children of the elites can go to Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge. The proletariat need these facilities to work.
