Ondo students protest new scholarship policy

BY DAYO JOHNSON

AKURE- STUDENTS of Ondo State origin under the auspices of the National Association of Ondo State Students have protested the introduction of examination by the state government before they can benefit from the award of Scholarship.

The students took to the streets preventing vehicular movement for hours over the weekend to protest government action and the upward review of the CGPA for deserving students from 3.5 to 4.0 before they could qualify for the payment.

But timely intervention of the police saved the situation from degenerating.

According to the National President of the NAOS, Victor Oguntoyinbo the student action was as a result of governments’ attachment of unfavourable condition to the award of scholarship.

Oguntoyinbo said that the about 5000 students paid N300.00 to obtain the forms.

He said if government was going to help student with the scholarship why the condition. The aptitude test and the 4.O GPA is a clever way to reduce the number of beneficiary.

It would be recalled that the present administration increased the scholarship from N25, 000 to N100, 000 per student but decided that the number beneficiaries has to be pegged at 100.

Reacting to the students action the state Chairman of Scholarship Board Mrs Remi Edu explained that the government took the steps to check racketeering and to ascertain the authentic students that qualified for the payment.

“We have paid bursary to 21,000 students which is about 218 million naira and we have paid the physically challenged this year.

“The appeal is that our children should run away from racketeering like in scholarship board here since this board has been set up no one can specify the exact students they are paying on yearly basis except this year.

On the change of the Cumulative Grade Point Average, CGPA, Edu said “We are the one on the field so we discovered that some students that do not have 3.0 CGPA have a way of changing it because there are so many methods of changing things and so many people are involved especially the students.

“”When we discovered that they have been changing these things and we discovered that the records they have in school is different from what they bring here during verification we were able to discover that their CGPA is not the same with what they have in school.

“With that we thought a serious minded child should be able to have 4.0 CGPA to come and take the scholarship. Most of our students are not serious that they can work their way through. So it’s a disease in our society that we are praying God should heal and the government is ready to help any serious minded students.

“”The aim of the test is an attempt to find out those who are actually serious and if the 4.0 is genuine. If they all score up to 80% we will know they are serious. And there can be another plan for them we want to ascertain their genuiness. The serious ones were ready to sit for the exam while those who were ready for the exams were frustrated.