By Jerome Okonkwo
There is growing discontent among students and staff members of the Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University (COOU) over what they consider as an absurd, exploitative academic and governance rot under the current Vice Chancellor.
The issues include arbitrary imposition of levies on students, poor learning and teaching environment, inadequacy of academic content of the semesters and poorly motivated workforce.
Observers say that Gov. Chukwuma Soludo should take interest in the situation by calling out the embattled Vice Chancellor, Prof. Kate Omenugha in order to save the university from further administrative rascality.
For the students, no fewer than 10,000 new intakes (many of them admitted less than one week to the first semester exams in March 2026)were billed N10,000 for what the management called a matriculation brochure entitled “Ifenkili” which turned out to be a book written in praise of the Vice Chancellor.
Secondly, and without the approval of the University Council, the Vice Chancellor embarked on an ICT transition programme where the University Portal was pulled down and a contract for a new one was awarded without a bid and as required by the Public Procurement Act and the COOU Law.
To access the new portal to register courses and make payments, every student of the University was directed to pay a mandatory sum of N15,000 by the management.
This was confirmed by a circular issued by the Directorate Of Information & Communication Technology, signed by the Director Engr. Prof. J.P. Iloh, who said the deadline for course registration for 1st Semester 2025/2026 on the new COOU App had been extended to April 15.
According to the circular, the extension is to enable the students to have enough time to download the app, complete their initial login process, make the necessary payments and complete their course registration on the app.
“The students are therefore expected to take advantage of this extension to complete their course registration,” the ICT memo said.
Students of the University have been protesting the obnoxious levies and poor academic content of the session and learning environment across different social media spaces.
In a widely circulated open letter of protest, a 100-Level Law Student (name withheld) expressed frustration over what he considered a regime of strangulating levies for services which ordinarily should be free.
The student questioned why the newly launched COOU Portal App should attract a mandatory burden of N15,000 ICT fee on students when it should actually be an institutional investment.
“I must therefore ask, what exactly is this N15,000 ICT fee for because the current charge raises legitimate concerns about proportionality and transparency.
“With an estimated student population of about 30,000, a compulsory payment of N15,000 per student amounts to N450,000,000, this is not a trivial figure, and it naturally prompts serious questions,” the student said.
Going further, the student said they were required to purchase a publication titled “Ifenkili” for N10,000 as a condition for entry into the examination hall.
He described the book as a collection of poems in praise of the Vice Chancellor with no academic relevance as it contained only photographs of school management and the names of matriculating students.
“Today it is N15,000 for an application, tomorrow, it may be even higher charges for necessities that should ordinarily be accessible,” he lamented
Another sad turn of event is the Vice Chancellor’s abandonment of University administration for open involvement in partisan politics.
More worrisome is the Vice Chancellor’s donation of a whooping sum of N10 million to members of a political party and gleeful announcement of the same in the media space.
For a university that is grappling with an acute infrastructure deficit such that most departments have just one classroom to service its entire students from year one to final year, the Part Time and, the Postgraduate programs, one wonders where Madam Vice Chancellor got the spare money to fund a political party.
Obviously, that money was neither approved by council nor Senate and if she claims the money is her personal money, how much of such donation.has she made before her assumption of office as Vice Chancellor.
It may be convenient to say that Madam Vice Chancellor whose appointment fell short of all laid down processes and hangs precariously in the balance as it is a subject of litigation, is running as an empress in line with the procedural impunity that enthroned her.
Could it be that she has made as much money through the numerous windows she created to milk parents and guardians of students, such that she now has enough to recklessly throw around without recourse to decency.
For the lecturers, the motivation for research and teaching is poor as some of them say they earn as low as 40 percent of what their contemporaries in the Federal University and some state Universities are paid.
The lecturers say hopes were high when a professor and world acclaimed scholar became the visitor of the institution but expressed disappointment that conditions of service had gone worse moreso, with the soaring inflation.
He said the infrastructure in the University was grossly inadequate and the increasing deference to NUC carrying capacity and the JAMB admission quota by the Vice Chancellor, especially in the past three years, was collapsing the existing facility.
According to one of them, we expected by now that new facilities would have been built because the immediate past Vice Chancellor left an infrastructure fund amounting to about N5 billion. But what we see is the university gate facelift even though the perimeter fence is collapsed all round the university and the safety of students on campus is not guaranteed.
Jerome Okonkwo writes from Uli
