Acting Vice Chancellor Rivers State University of Science and Technology Nkpolu Port Harcourt, Prof. Blessing Didia (right), presenting souvenir to the State Chairman NUJ, Mr. Ayo Tamuno, during a working visit to the acting vice chancellor recently. Photo: Nwiueh Donatus Ken

Developments surround
ing the recent suspension of the Student Union  Government (SUG) President of the Rivers State University of Science  and Technology (RSUST), Comrade Wealth Gospel  seem to have taken a clearer turn.
The initial feeling of some of the students was that the Acting V ice Chancellor (VC), Professor Blessing Didia, “arranged” the suspension in a bid to install his loyalist.
No sooner had the SUG President been suspended than the students alleged that they started experiencing some vices such as theft and rape in the campus, even in day light.
Some of the students who spoke to The Tide  alleged that several of their colleagues, especially females had been raped and their handsets and other valuables, including money taken from them.
They also claimed that the classrooms were gradually becoming unsafe for them because their fellow students, believed to be cultists, came to terrorise them in the classrooms.
When contacted, the VC debunked claims of students being terrorised and all insinuations of a return to the era of cultism in the university, giving his own version of the suspension of the SUG president.
In an exclusive interview in his office, Professor Didia, unequivocally stated that he had no hand in the expulsion of the SUG president.
According to him, he in herited the Executive of the SUG on his appointment on August 1, 2015 and settled down to work with them, only to be approached in October 2015 by other members of the Executive that they had suspended their President.
“That Executive was introduced to me by the former VC (Professor Barineme Fakae). I had no business desolving them under the pretext that I don’t know how they came to be.
“By October 2015, the Executive came to inform me that they had suspended their President. The evidence was there. Following this, I  reasoned that there could be crisis if the students go the way they were  going”, he said.
The Acting VC explained further that rather than allow things to degenerate into chaos, he urged members of the executive to have a rethink. At the end of the day, they heeded his advice, “and the President  knelt down and begged his colleagues that he would turn a new leaf and work closely with them”
But rather than keep to his words, the SUG President went and appointed his own Chief Security Officer (CSO), and a task force, headed by the CSO, which allegedly did some of the things the students stated.
This, Professor Didia said, was in addition to mismanagement of SUG fund for his personal interest, which included empowering of members of his taskforce to the detriment of both students and the school authority.
“Members of the task force snatched phones from students and made the classrooms uncomfortable for learning”, the Acting VC said, adding that when it was verified that those carrying out the acts were insiders, measures were taken to address the situation.
“We hastened our own security system and started arresting them. Right now, they are in police custody. We found out that they were able to do what they did because they were backed by the SUG President. That was  the increase in cultism as alleged”, he concluded.

Sogbeba Dokubo