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| Prof Eghagha |
The Delta State
Commissioner for Higher Education, poet, author and lecturer, Professor Hope
Eghagha, has reacted to an unconfirmed
allegation over fake names in the bursary list of Delta State students in
tertiary institutions and described the rumour as spurious.
The columnist and
former member of the Editorial Board of The Guardian newspapers says, “Check
the newspapers of 2011 between July and September, you will find that we made
announcement of fake names trying to benefit from the bursary. We found it
amusing when students said they discovered the fake names. Let those who want
to be thorough in their investigation go back to their archive and look at when
the news came out. We briefed the executive arm of the government and they know
that they are persons called ‘bursary merchants’.
I don’t know whether they have been able to
really confront that issue before. But this time, with the support of the
government, we decided to tackle it. And each year we did the bursary, we
refunded money back to Delta State Government. This year, although we received
580 million naira, we expended 500 million naira. 80 million naira is there. We
did that for four years. A board that is returning money is now accused of
fraud.
"What we have
always said is: “this money is meant for students.”
Some students don’t register well. Some use wrong bank
account. Some, the name of the applicants are different from the account
holders’ names. In the first year, when we
confronted them, they said it is their mother’s account and we
advised them to open their own accounts.
“Our people have a proverb that, if you
catch a thief in your farm in the morning, and call him a thief, he would call
you a thief. That is what is going on. It is very sad that persons who have
been doing funny things in the system are the ones crying aloud now more than
the bereaved and some persons believed them. Some people in the social media
and bloggers just lashed into that without even getting the other side of the
story. It is very sad.
”We heard of accusation about insertion
of fake names. We are doing our best to make sure that all those fake names don’t
collect bursary, though we have not gone round to fish out the person who did
it. But the matter has been reported to security agencies. Indeed! When we
looked at those names and those accounts, we didn’t
have to believe that one person did that. It is not easy for one man or two
persons to open 23,000 fake accounts. So what we believed is that different
persons did it," he said.
He advised the
public to go and see who opened the accounts, if the accounts were opened and
who benefited.
"At this stage
we have not established who did it but we believed that different persons
attempted it. The fact that we stopped it was an achievement. It was an
attempted fraud, they didn’t succeed. We have tightened the
loopholes. If per adventure they succeeded in one way or the other, that is the
reason we go to Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and there is a
review process every year. Working with the board in 2009, we decided to be
transparent."
Some blogs published
that nobody knows the where about of Ambrose Ezenwani, the man who claimed that
he raised an alarm about the bursary list after he was transferred from Sabo
Police Station, Lagos to Delta State. Eghagha explains, “The
Delta State Government did not arrest anybody, neither did the Delta State
instruct any agent to arrest anybody. I did not arrest anybody. Apart from the
formal complaint that we made in 2011, we have not set out to arrest anybody
but what happened was that one of the fellows that were mentioned has been a
beneficiary of scams that have been in the system. He is a graduate that has
finished his national service who brought some ex students together and they
converged in the University of Lagos with a big poster and accused the board of
fraud. It was amusing looking at the man who was accusing others.
“I implore you to go to the University of
Lagos and ask some students from Delta State who are in their final year and
those who have graduated about the bursary.
The National
Association of Delta State Students in University (NADESSTU) was very enraged
about the accusation so they travelled to Lagos, made formal complaints and he
was arrested and detained. Then the police in Delta State rearrested him and
charged him to court. He was remanded in prison by the magistrate until the
next hearing which is coming up on June 9, 2014, and some people went online
and accused Delta State Government of arresting him whom they described as the
whistle blower. We blew the whistle in 2011 that is the reason we have been
putting all these mechanism to stop fraud.
If I ordered his arrest, I would be man enough to say so. He did enough
to be arrested but I just ignored him, feeling he is a young man that is just
starting his life.
“If we had gone after the 23,000 names
that were fake, people would complain and accuse us of disturbing innocent
students. But that has changed. Subsequently, when we find names of persons
trying implicate the board, we will report and let the security go after one or
two of them.
"The narrative
was altered. The persons who discovered the infraction within the system were
now being accused and most of those touts went to town without doing proper
investigations. It is important for the press to get the other side of the
story before they publish any story,”
Eghagha said.
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