Although the author of this piece excluded the ‘pay our dad and we pay registration fees’ dimension of the current crisis rocking the Benue State University, he shows a completely different image of the university touted as a jet set run university. How could the university with the highest concentration of star professors from ABU, Zaria and the University of Jos be stuck in the unimaginable rottenness suggested in the earlier intervention by the Pro-Chancellor and this piece? Beyond the registration or administrative chaos in focus, unspeakable nepotism in admission to such courses as Law and Medicine as well as student documentation crisis have been reported. Who can clean Benue State University, Makurdi up? – Intervention
By Nomishan Terngu Sylvanus
The author
I would want the Benue State University community and the general public to know that several things are wrong in the operations and management of BSU and this has been going on for so many years now. There are abnormalities with the students as well as the management although I think Benue State University Makurdi has charismatic leaders such as Professor Zacharys Anger Gundu, the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council and Professor Msugh Moses Kembe, the Vice Chancellor.
Abnormalities with the studentry
In every standard institution in the world, there are rules and regulations that govern its operations. One of these is students’ registration. Now, what is students’ registration? This is the legal means of identifying self as a student of a particular institution in a particular session and it is done as follows: At the start of the session, students are expected to pay their tuition and session charges. This is what grants the students full access to the portal for other registration exercises. After payment of charges, the students move to the next step which is course registration. Here, the students, first and foremost, consult their course advisors to know which course is core and which one is elective and after confirmation, the student moves on to register for the courses he or she wants to offer for the said session. The next step from course registration is the departmental registration. The students meet their departmental registration officers to register with the department and get ready to receive lectures for the semester at hand. After all these are completed by the students, they acquire their various lecture time tables and begin to attend their lectures.
However, in Benue State University, students don’t follow this procedure. I have been working with the students of Benue State University now for more than two years as a computer operative and I fully understand that majority of BSU students attend lectures without registering for such courses at all. Many of them come to register during examination period. This is unacceptable because it means that traders from Gboko, Katsina Ala, Agberagba and any part of the state or even the country can come and receive lectures at Benue State University without any barrier or hindrance. This is bad and such must be stopped. No matter who we are, we must respect and adhere to the school rules and regulations. Unless someone just wants to be around school environment, BSU should no longer continue to keep those who are not her students. They should vacate the premises of the school. Again, it is paramount to say that students should receive instructions from the school management and not the school management receiving instructions from the students. This is another abnormality.
Prof Gundu, Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council, BSU: Is Prof set to deal with documentation chaos, nepotism in admission and sundry infractions at BSU?
The Abnormalities on the Part of the Management
If you have a child and you give such a child instructions on when to return home from his or her outdoor activities, may be 5pm and nothing in excess of this, that child will know that he or she has such a deadline and strive to get home by 4. 55 pm or so. This is because if s/he has to wait for the approved 5pm, s/he might end up arriving home by 5. 02 pm or well after that and which will be unacceptable. Following my experience with the student registration portal of the Benue State University for more than two years now, I have come to understand the following. One, the management of BSU does not attach time or periods to that portal. This means that there is no specific time to start registration for a session and there is no time to end registration for a session. Two, the portal has no opening or closing periods. Since the day I started operating on that portal, it has always been left open for registration, which means that, students can register courses even after they might have sat for their examinations. This is simply not good enough on the part of the management. The portal also allows any body to log into any other students’ school account. You could imagine that a student came to pay school fees online, I logged into his school profile and generated the payment reference and moved on to pay the fees online. In the end, it was another student’s school fees that was paid, it became a problem until we found the said student and luckily for us, he refunded the money. How can a school portal be so bad to this extent? This is also unacceptable. The fourth point is this. There was a time when the portal allowed the use of registration number to be used as username as well as password to log into students’ account.
This was very terrible. I had never seen such a thing in my life. It means that a student can log into the account of his or her enemy to change his or her registered courses which will cause a great lifetime disaster for the other fellow. These things should be stopped.
Recommendations
In everything we do in life, communication is paramount. If you are informed, you will surely get prepared but if this is not done, one can just do anything and everything on the basis of happenstance. Communication leads to safety, good leadership and harmonious interpersonal relationship. The students should always be told what to do and when to do it. This, I think, will rather be more proper. If you want the right thing to be done at the right time, inform those involved about the right thing at the right time.
If every student is aware that he or she has to always return from break with school fees, they will surely keep to that, knowing that failure to do so may result to probation or spill over as the case may be.
I also want to inform the management of BSU that security in the school is weak and the lecturers are too powerful. This is not healthy for the institution. If things must be right, the school administration should be answerable to the state executive and the security should be answerable to the school administration while the lecturers are answerable to the security as well as the students to the lecturers. The BSU students fear their lecturers but underrate the security which is supposed to be the enforcer of the rules and regulations of the school. ‘The right thing should be done in the right way at the right time’.
