Fire Destroys UNN Council Chamber

A section of University of Nigeria, Nsukka Continuous Education Centre (CEC) housing the Council Chamber has been gutted by fire.

The fire, it was gathered, started in the early hours of Saturday with equipment worth millions of naira and vital documents destroyed.

An eye witness said in Nsukka on Saturday that the fire started at about 4a.m. from a cyber café, where students were doing an overnight browsing.

He said that instead of raising alarm for people to come and assist in putting out the inferno, the night browsers sneaked out of the place.

“The council chamber as well some business centres were completely razed by the inferno,” the source said.

The university’s chief security officer and CEC manager who refused to give their names, declined to speak with NAN correspondent, stressing that they needed to get permission from the appropriate authorities before speaking to the media.

However, when contacted, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof Bartho Okolo, described the fire incident as unfortunate, especially at this time that the university was striving to address issues of poor facilities.

“It is unfortunate that this fire disaster that destroyed equipment worth millions of naira in CEC happened at a moment the management is making effort to improve the facilities in the university,’’ he said.

Okolo said an electrical fault ignited the fire and ruled out sabotage.

“It is electrical fault, there is no act of sabotage in it,” the V-C said.

In a comment, Mr Osmond Omuh, Chief Fire Service Officer in Nsukka, said he was contacted by the Nsukka Local Government Chairman, Mr Tony Ugwu, at about 5 a.m., and his men immediately moved to the scene,

Omuh noted that if the university community had called when the fire started, they would have limited the damage.

“I thank the local government chairman who alerted us, if not, the situation could have been worse,’’ he said.