No fewer than 45 students of the University of Uyo have been arrested over the violent protest they staged on Wednesday within and around the campus, which resulted in the death of least one person.
The state Police Commissioner, Mr. Umar Gwadabe who confirmed the arrests also confirmed the death of one student. Though the police commissioner did not give out the name, Daily Sun learnt that the student who was shot dead during the crisis was Kinsley Umoette.
His course and year of study were yet to be ascertained as at press time. Gwadabe said but for the timely intervention by the police, the Uyo riot would have engulfed the town as students from the University of Calabar, and those from Bida who had infiltrated the University of Uyo students, were bent on unleashing mayhem on the city. He said he didn’t see any wrong in the police effort to curb the crisis.
“I didn’t see anything the police have done wrong in trying to stop the situation from escalating,” he said. But the registrar of the institution, Mrs Edak Umondak, who yesterday ordered the indefinite closure of the institution, was quoted to have expressed her displeasure of the police action, which led to the death of the student.
She said but for the timely intervention of some staff who took her from her car to safety, she could equally have been shot dead by the police. “I thought the police bullets had hit me.
I didn’t know when my colleagues whisked me away barefooted. It was a surprise because we identified ourselves, yet the police were adamant and still hit our car. The school authority did not authorize any policeman to shoot any student not to talk of using live bullets,” she stated.
Chairman, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Uyo branch, Mr. Anyim Nwachukwu, said the crisis was beyond his comprehension. He stated that the union members were to have a meeting that day when the protest started; noting that from the information they received, the police used live bullets to hit the students. “What we know for now is that there was crisis in the campus yesterday. But from the information we received, some lives were lost. The students in turn razed school property.
We are only going round now to assess the extent of damage. “As we are going around, we discovered that some offices of mycolleagues had been broken into and some things stolen.
We can’t still be definite about the kind of damage, which had occurred yesterday. “We were supposed to have a meeting yesterday, but for some of us who were around, we saw tear-gas canisters thrown inside the school premises.
Right now we can’t really tell what happened because some of us were inside, though we managed to escape from campus,” he said. Apart from the vice chancellor/deputy vice chancellor; exams/records and council affairs offices, which were completely razed by the protesting students who rose against what they call the exploitative tendency of the authorities of the institution, Daily Sun learnt that the rampaging students broke into other offices and carted away some equipment.
Hard disks were removed from computers in the computer maintenance department, 12 vehicles vandalized, while finance and accounts, students accounts, and cash offices, were alsovandalized and broken into.
The students and some staffers were calling on the president, who is the visitor to the university to remove Prof. Comfort Ekpo as the vice chancellor of the university, claiming that she had grounded the university even while exploiting the students.
The students had on Wednesday embarked on a protect which turned later violent against the newly introduced N2, 000 as registration fees for general courses and N200 as transport fare from the town campus to the main campus. The University of Uyo operates four campuses: the town campus, the annex campus, the main campus along Nwaniba Road and the remedial courses campus along Uyo Road, Abak.
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