From 80M Naira To A New Tariff Of 280 M Monthly Bill: Benin Varsity’s Electricity Challenge Shows Their Lack Of Foresight
The Oasis Reporters
June 4, 2024
L-R: Vice Chancellor, University of Benin (UNIBEN), Prof. Lilian Salami; Tor Tiv and UNIBEN Chancellor, His Royal Majesty Orcivirigh Prof. James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse; Dr. Thomas Segun Ilube; Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, and Pro-Chancellor, UNIBEN, Dr. Sonny Kuku, during the 46th and 47th convocation ceremony of UNIBEN, in Benin City, on Saturday, November 27, 2021.
Students in the University of Benin in Benin City, Edo State, one of the first five tier-1 academic institutions in Nigeria are restive. The issue is the lack of electricity which an academic institution should not, ordinarily speaking, lack in a modern society.
Beyond the use of electricity to power heavy hospital equipment and for research, students need to charge their laptops and phones. And then get water from the borehole.
This is currently lacking and it easily exposes the rot in academia.
Most significantly, it also exposes the lack of a serious approach to solving societal problems which should be the core essence of their establishment.
University of Benin now finds itself at a crossroads. Students are angry that they have no energy to do things. Basic electric power is missing. Government funding is declining. The university authorities are in a state of helplessness, running from pillar to post throwing out plenty of saliva to explain why things have gotten out of hand.
According to the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Lilian Salami who we listened to in an interview she hurriedly and breathlessly gave to a radio station in the city in pidgin English, the local street slang of Edo people, They were paying 80 million naira monthly bill to the electricity power authority, Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC).
Listen to Prof. Salami.
This tariff has now been jacked up and the University is expected to cough out 280 million naira monthly, almost an impossible amount. Their desperate plea to restive students is to talk to them into managing about three hours of electricity every night.
Perhaps an additional one more hour in the morning to enable the pumping of water to the community.
And that would be all for the day for a university that has a teaching hospital where electricity should not blink, apart from many other uses in other areas of research all over the enormous campuses, the oldest being at Ekenwan and Ugbowo.
By listening to the interviews and the Vice Chancellor parley on radio, one revelation is the sheer lack of foresight of the university administrators. There’s no longer futuristic thinking in their faculty, to the level of over relaxation without realizing that universities are by design, meant to solve societal problems and advance the nation forward. All they wait for is government subvention, money for them to spend, then recline on their seats smugly. This has been going on for decades and now the chicken has come home to roost.
They have a faculty of engineering, with departments of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, civil engineering etc.
Every year they send students on compulsory Industry attachment. Yet they have no futuristic thinking to utilize these students and their professors in designing several types of building independent power plants that can energize their own environment, not even talking about the city in the first place.
This is a university that started over 50 or 60 years ago or thereabouts. They continued to rely on government handouts. Now the government is finding it difficult to manage inflation and the university community is practically speaking, abandoned and left to its own devices.
It simply can’t pay its bills and the electricity corporation is not a charity organization. It is either they pay up, or they are disconnected. Period.
Why didn’t the university fashion out a program to start training its engineering students on solar powered systems installations first, before manufacturing later in all these decades for them to be free and to make money, solving the problems of society?
Every student there has a social media account. They may not realize it. There are social media companies that were incubated on university campuses.
This is not to say that the University of Benin did not start well. A member of the university community invented the blood transfusion system to purify and re-inject a patient’s blood, almost eliminating donated blood transfusion in hospitals. It was Dr. Ovedhe that pioneered it.
Another member of the university community, professor Bazuaye pioneered the treatment of sickle cell anemia through blood transfusion etc. So university of Benin has got what it takes but they lack the ability to harness the potentials in the community.
Further reading:
https://www.theoasisreporters.com/ubth-prof-upturns-pentecostal-pastors-attitude-to-sickle-cell-and-marriage-cures-it/
Therefore for now, there is no electricity for Uniben. They can’t pay the electricity bill and they had no futuristic thinking for solving these dynamics. So they are comatose because the government cannot bail them out, nor do they know how to bail themselves out.
Greg Abolo
gregabolo@gmail.com
