The assaulted students, members of a group called the Education
Right Campaign (ERC), were meeting on Sunday to review their protest
during President Jonathan’s visit when the rival group stormed their
meeting to instigate a fight.
Some student
activists at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife who staged
protests during President Goodluck Jonathan’s visit to their campus last
Friday were last Sunday badly assaulted by a rival group of
machete-wielding students in what one victim described as “a sponsored
attack by pro-Jonathan supporters.” One of the victims of the attack,
David Adeniyi, who sustained machete cuts on the head, was reportedly on
admission in a hospital in critical condition.
The assaulted students, members of a group called the Education Right
Campaign (ERC), were meeting on Sunday to review their protest
during President Jonathan’s visit when the rival group stormed their
meeting to instigate a fight.
Mr. Jonathan and other political
figures had come to the university last week to attend a
political conference during which a section of Yoruba leaders announced
their endorsement of Mr. Jonathan for re-election.
SaharaReporters had reported that
some students protested against President Jonathan, booing him and
throwing stones at his delegation. Mr. Jonathan’s handlers tried to deny
that there were any protests, claiming that the students had warmly
received the president. SaharaReporters subsequently obtained and
posted video footage of students protesting against Mr. Jonathan during
his visit.
An OAU student told SaharaReporters that the fracas on Sunday began
when the university’s student union president, Ibikunle Isaac Motunrayo,
and his supporters harassed some of the ERC members led by student
union vice-president Oladejo Olufunmi.
“The OAU student union president came around to the student union
building to launch an attack on the Education Right Campaign (ERC),
which led the students on a protest during President Goodluck Jonathan's
visit. Students of OAU who are members of the ERC were brutally
beaten,” one eyewitness told our correspondent.
Echoing the report, ERC's national coordinator, Hassan Taiwo Soweto,
and national secretary,Michael Ogundele, released a press statement
yesterday condemning the violence. They demanded that the Presidency and
the university management should “come clean” if they played no role in
the attacks.
“With [a] heavy heart, we wish to bring to the notice of Nigerians
that members of the Education Rights Campaign (ERC) and radical student
activists at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) are under vicious
attack by a rightwing section of the Students Union leadership led by
the President Ibikunle Isaac Motunrayo in brutal retribution for
organizing a protest against President Jonathan when he visited the
campus on Friday 28 November 2014,” the ERC group said.
“As at yesterday night (Sunday 30 November 2014), some members of the
ERC were hospitalized and discharged after their injuries were treated.
However another student activist, Adeniyi David, is still lying in
critical condition at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Ile-Ife
after sustaining deep machete wounds on his head.
The ERC stated that the unprovoked attack began around 6 p.m. on
Sunday at the lower TV room of the Students Union Building (SUB). Their
statement claimed that a group of young men, including Akhuma Dbusta and
Israel Beji, led by the student union’s public relation
officer, Bamidele Oludare, and Daniel Momodu (the immediate past
secretary general of the Yinka Gbadebo-led executive of the National
Association of Nigerian Students), swooped on them.
The ERC members said their attackers made it clear that the assault
was for their “audacity to organize a protest against President
Jonathan.”
“We have no doubt where this attack emanated from. Some of the
ringleaders of this attack, like Daniel Momodu, have strong links with
President Jonathan’sgovernment especially through his senior assistant
on students and youth, Jude Imagwe,” said an ERC source. They asserted
that Mr. Ibikunle Isaac Motunrayo and Mr. Bamidele Oludare were known
paid agents of the university administration led by Professor Tale
Omole.
“The university management had recently used these people to scuttle a
students' protest against fee hike,” said the ERC source.
According to the group’s statement, “It is not an accident that all
those who participated in the attack were those who cheered President
Jonathan during his visit and also posed for a picture with him. We
believe they have their democratic rights to support the President.
However, democracy also means that those who feel otherwise be allowed
the freedom to exercise their right without assault. We challenge the
Presidency and the university management to come clean if they played no
role in this vicious attack by arresting all those responsible and
prosecuting them in a court of competent jurisdiction.”
Funmi Oladejo, a student union executive at the university, told a
reporter from Punch newspaper that the fight arose over Mr. Jonathan's
visit. “What started the fight, I heard, was that ERC were
having [their] meeting when the president and PRO passed through the
place and saw them. [The president] then called his boys to start
coming [because] some people [were] having an opposition meeting at SUB
and they all came to beat those on the ground.
“After beating them up, they ran away...We later realized that
those [who] ran to town went to hire ‘cults’, who came with machetes.”
An OAU student gravelly told SaharaReporters, “OAU union leaders are
harboring cultists. This is against the culture and norms of the
school.”
In condemning the assault on
their members, the ERC said their group would “not be cowed or silenced
in its effort to mobilize Nigerian students and youth to resist
anti-poor education policies. Instead this attack, though vicious, is a
confirmation that our protest on Friday against President Jonathan
struck the right chord. We are therefore motivated more than ever before
to organize more protests against all thieving members of the
capitalist ruling elite regardless of their political party and wherever
we can find them.”
They urged the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), other
staff unions, trade unions, civil society and human right groups to
condemn this attack and demand that the government and the university
management prosecute its perpetrators. They also demanded that students
be allowed “to run their union independently and democratically without
interference.”
They lauded all OAU students and student union officials who came out
“in defense of our comrades and in defense of the cause of truth and
struggle.”
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