Violent protest in University of Port Harcourt, leaves one dead

Students of University of Port Harcourt on Monday embarked on violent protest over the increase in the university’s tuition fee and other levies.

Comrade Peter, President Faculty of Management Sciences was allegedly shut dead by police after the students of the school were said to have blocked all entry and exit points leading into the school.

This is coming on the heels of similar protest by the students of the University of Lagos last Friday leading to the closure of the school.

UNIPORT protest, it was gathered started as early as 5.00am as students barricaded all access roads leading to the institution, including the major East-West road and the Choba-Uniport road.

It was learnt that the Students are demanding the resignation of their Vice Chancellor and asking for reduction of fees which were said to be among the highest  compared to other federal universities in the country.

The student alleges that despite the high fees, the school authority still insist they pay faculty dues, departmental dues, exam registration fees and many others.

“We are sick and tired of all these payments. They even went ahead to issue a deadline for these payments not considering that things are hard for our parents.

“We decided to embark on this protest today because our 1st semester exams are supposed to start today and what we have done is to stop it from holding,” an angry student yelled.

ALSO SEE: UNIPORT students ground academic activities

Meanwhile, Dr. Williams Wodi, a Deputy Registrar and spokesman of the institution
was quoted to have said that “What’s going on is that less than 2 percent of our students are protesting and are refusing to allow workers and other students to come into the campus to start their Exams or do their legitimate duties.

“We sensitized our students as far back as November 2015, that we are going to change the perception of University where students come to school free and carry over all school fees from year one to the final year and they should pay what we gave as outstanding charges because we do charge school fees.

We told them that all returning students are to pay N45,000. That has been communicated through the school website, circular and the school bulletins and others.

“When we wanted to enforce the payment at the beginning of the session we saw that the
compliance was very low, the first deadline was 21 February 2016, we extended it to
March 11, 2016, we made it lecture free for all students to pay. We recorded some
mileages.

Again, we extended it to March 30, 2016. We still had some students who have not paid so we opened our portal on April 5 and for them to pay we still had problems with a couple of them and reopened it on April 6 and closed it on midnight of April 7.

From November last year to February 12, March 11, March 30, April 5 and finally April 7 and 98 percent of students complied. About 2 percent of the students have not complied and they are the ones making heaven and earth meet.

However, Andrew Ajayi, a former student Union leader slammed  UNIPORT authorities to have increased the fees in January and expect parents to pay in the month of January when parents and guardians have scarce resources after Christmas festivities.

Andrew Ajayi did not spare students who are protesting over school fees increase ranging
between N45,000 and N70,000 including 50 percentage surcharge for deficit when they
carry smart phones worth thrice the amount of the fees.