OOU protest: Students go haywire, meet Amosun

Pandemonium broke out on Friday morning, in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, as the protest by students of the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, entered the second day, taking a frightening dimension.

Saturday Tribune recalled that the students had on Thursday morning, stormed the entrance of the governor’s office, Oke-Mosan, protesting the reduction of school fees in all the state-owned institutions.

As early as 7.00am, the students in their hundreds, blocked the Presidential Boulevard, along Moshood Abiola Stadium, Kuto,with their school buses causing griddlock along the ever busy road.

Members of the public, especially civil servants going to work were caught up in the confusion. The development paralysed commercial activities in the area as shop owners, commercial motorcyclists and newspaper vendors left their wares and scampered for safety.

It took the prompt intervention of combined security operatives, which included the men of the Nigerian Police and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) to forestall any breakdown of law and order.

However, the situation turned chaotic, when the students attempted to block the Ibara Government Reservation road, in order to ground vehicular movements. This action forced the Police to fire teargas to disperse the angry students from the road.

The aggrieved students went wild destroying property which runs into millions of naira. Commercial taxi drivers were worst-hit in the melee that lasted for about six hours. The students smashed windscreen of some taxi drivers, while few private vehicle owners were also unlucky.

With this development, Saturday Tribune gathered that some leaders of the students were invited to a meeting with Governor Ibikunle Amosun on the issue.

At the end of the meeting which lasted for about an hour, the governor directed the aggrieved students to vacate the road and meet up with him at the stadium and later addressed them.

Amosun appealed to the students not to be unruly when there were issues, urging them to channel their grievances through official means. The governor said that the committee set up by government to review the reduction in school fees would look into the agitations of the students and harmonised the peculiarity as regards their school

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