It was a very eventful and sad day in the history of the University of Port Harcourt. If I remember rightly, that period was the 2015/2016 academic session of the school, and it was my year three first semester. In the early morning of that very day, I prepared and left home for our first paper (POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA, BY PROFESSOR HENRY ALAPIKI). I left home excitedly that morning (because I was well-prepared for the exams), I never knew that something serious had started going on within the campus. I strolled from my lodge (at back of UDSS) down to Delta Park and to Choba Junction, and then what I saw looked like a revolution-oriented protest was going on in a country. The protest was so massive and serious. It was a day I will never forget in a hurry. The sight of the protest appeared to be very entertaining at a point. I got a call and left Choba Junction (the epicenter of the protest) for town. Just some minutes later, someone called and advised me to avoid Choba junction while returning, because some security agents had started attacking students violently at Choba junction and had even killed a student. The news was very shocking to my ears. I heeded the advice and avoided Choba and passed through other routes (Ozuoba-Rumuosi-Boundary) to Aluu. While passing through Boundary to Aluu I noticed that a group of fellow students carried the corpse of a fellow student and headed to the premises of a popular radio station. SO IT WAS TRUE! It was quite a sad incident, a very sad one indeed!
May the soul of the killed comrade Peter Ofurum rest in perfect peace.
I didn’t really participate in the protest and I was never part of the destruction of anything in the school, but eventually we were all forced to pay N5,000 for the damages of that day.
Uniport is a good school in many respects. But there are many things that are not good about the school and need to be changed or improved. In fact in the very words of Professor Henry Alapiki, “the system in Uniport is sick!” Some people hear the name Uniport from afar and they think it is Oxford University, but when they come into the system they begin to see what we have seen. For example, some delays and difficulties that students are made to experience in the system are unwarranted and essentially avoidable.
I wouldn’t want this write-up to be too long. But I like it to be a clarion call to the Management of Uniport on the need for the entirety of service delivery in the school to be improved.
Kingsley Onwuka