By: Utibe Emmanuel

On Sunday, 17th of December 2023, the University of Ibadan Students’ Representative Council (UI’SRC) held a meeting in the SRC chambers at the Students Union building to deliberate on the pressing issues as regards students welfare so far. 

The meeting started off with a report of the effort of the office of the house secretary as it regards the issue of students’ welfarism so far on campus. In his report, the House secretary, Sanjay, told of how on the issue of tution fee, the Union worked to make sure there was no increase.

He also talked on the issue of transportation. While they came up with a compromise with other stakeholders for a proposed price when the University transport council release the price list, there was still a deviance from that proposed price which they had made effort since then to try to remedy but they have not had so much of a headway there. 

On the prices of commodities, the House Secretary said that while they have made moves to release a price list, the instability of the price of commodities has not helped the situation. He added that nonetheless, the SU is looking towards second semester to make sure things work.

While on bank charges, the house secretary said the union already made a release for there to be a maximum of N20 charges on goods above 1k and no charges paid on things less than that. He said there have been reports of none compliance by some vendors but that the union is working tirelessly to curtail that. 

After the report was presented by the house secretary, there was several rounds of questioning directed towards him alongside deliberations by those student leaders present at the meeting. After several hours of deliberation, the house arrived at some resolutions.

Amongst the resolutions are: Ensuring more synergy between the office of the House Secretary and the House Committees, Hall Executives, in charge of welfare and other relevant local authority.

On transport, the Union is to keep on with it’s effort to ensure that during the coming transport price review meeting, the current prices are still maintained. This is together with the other ongoing efforts by the union in addresing the transport issues.

On Issues of bank charges and price regulation, local task forces would be created at both hall and faculty level which would work to ensure local enforcement of the the SU position on the bank charges ensuring that no vendor collects charges on goods less than N1000 and that a maximum of N20 charges is collected when it’s more than N1000. Together with these, more channels would be created to allow students report the non-compliance of vendors to this, and students would be encouraged to report all defaulting persons.

Also a public notice would be printed and pasted at all shops spelling out clearly the position of the Union on this issue. And in the event where a vendor decides to still flout the rules, the Union would take strong measure against that vendor. 

Speaking at the end of the meeting, Sanjay said, “So basically, with this meeting we have been able to reach a conclusion to have a more extensive task force involving both the halls of residence and the facilities. And so with this, if there is an issue in Mellanby Hall, the local task force there would be the first point of contact being the ones in the hall and with the most knowledge of the situation. As it has been shown that leaving it at the Students Union level alone has not been working based on the results that we have been seeing and so, we are now moving to a more decentralised approach. This is to ensure enforcement of regulations as regards bank charges and price regulation as the case may be”. 

The meeting was supposed to have the Union House secretary, Majority leaders of each constituency, members of the house committee on welfare, representatives of the executive council of each hall of residence and honourable members of the council, but only saw a fair amount of people in attendance. 

It is of note that aside the Chairman of the Council of Hall chairpersons, who is Kenneth Mellanby Hall chair, the Mayor of Sultan Bello Hall, the Hall chair of Nnamdi Azikiwe Hall –who came in late–, and the Buttery minister of Obafemi Awolowo Hall, all other halls were not represented at the meeting. While for the faculties, only one faculty president was present.