The 2019 degree graduates of Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education Owerri, Imo state have lamented the high rate of extortion by the management of the college.
The college is an affiliate of the University of Nigeria Nsukka.
The students said it was unfortunate that they have not been mobilised for the National Youth Service Corps programme after two years of their graduation.
The spokesman of the student, Chike Anyaso, from the Department of Education/Social Studies, said the degree students had been milked dry by the AIFCE management ahead of their convocation.
Adding his voice, Matthew Anyanwu from the department of Guidance and Counselling listed payment they had made to the college to include N3,000 for accreditation, N2000 for alumni levy, N20,000 for convocation, N1,000 for golden jubilee celebration, N2,000 for NYSC screening, N6,000 for Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria, N5,000 for TRCN induction and N3,500 for TRCN exam.
He, however, added that the school management recently released another notice, urging them to pay another convocation fee of N5,000 after the initial N20,000 they had paid.
Another student, Babara Nsukpo, noted that there had been several payments concerning graduation clearance, regretting that the college management had not made any conscious effort to get UNN to mobilise them for the NYSC programme.
She said, “We graduated since 2019 having gained admission in 2015/2016 academic year. Since we graduated, the college management has been giving us an excuse that COVID-19 pandemic stopped them from mobilising us for the NYSC programme.
“When we contacted UNN in July, 2021 to mobilise us for the NYSC programme, they told us to better sort ourselves out with AIFCE management. Since then we have been writing to our school to remind them to send us to NYSC.
“Since that time till now, we have not heard anything from them. But they told us that the information will come to us no more than three weeks from that time.”
When contacted, the College Registrar,Ben Anyanwu, said he was aware of the students’ complaint.
He said, “AIFCE is an affiliate of UNN, but these students don’t know how higher institution operates. The N20,000 convocation fee they paid was sent to UNN but the N5,000 they are to pay now is for the AIFCE NCE convocation.
“The students should calm down because NYSC programme is coming up in November 2021.”
The Vice-Chancellor, Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti, Prof Edward Olanipekun, has said that EKSU International College, Afao Ekiti, will recruit the best brains to ensure quality instruction and excellent performance of the students.
Olanipekun, who spoke at an event in the university, said that through the ongoing admission of its first set of students expected to resume this month, EKSU had broken the jinx of not having international school, adding that the college had come to stay.
EKSU VC- Prof Edward Olanipekun
“I want the best brains to be employed in our international college in the ongoing recruitment exercise. I am personally interested in the recruitment. The college will take off with Junior Secondary School one, two and Senior Secondary School three classes.
“The institution is fortified with standard infrastructure and security architecture. We have also recruited armed personnel to guard against any breach of security. Parents can bring their children to the college and go to sleep”, He added.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has called on the National Assembly to pass the Bill to amend the National Universities Commission Act to address the proliferation of state universities.
The coordinator of the Kano Zone of the Union, Prof. Abdulkadir Muhammad made the call at a press conference held at Bayero University Kano.
Muhammad, who called for the passage of the bill, also called on the visitors of the Universities to live up to their responsibilities.
“We are calling on the national assembly to, as a matter of urgency, consider and pass the Bill. Due to bad governance and underfunding, our state-owned universities may soon collapse beyond redemption.
“Visitors of state universities had turned establishment of state universities into projects for appeasing electorates in their senatorial and state constituencies, while neglecting the existing state universities.
“Besides non funding of capital projects, most state governors have also failed in the primary responsibility of regular payment of staff salaries in their universities,” he added.
The coordinator said that the association also rejected the charging of exorbitant tuition fees in the state universities because it places university education beyond the reach of common Nigerians.
The association also urged the Federal Government to sign and implement the draft ASUU/FGN renegotiated agreement of May, 2021, in addition to the release of the first tranche of the N30 billion funds for the revitalization of public universities.
“The government should also release N25billion Earned Academic Allowance.
“We also urge the federal government to immediately remit withheld check-off dues to the branches of the withheld and amputated salaries/ allowances and third party deductions.” he added.
The coordinator said that the Union would always deploy appropriate measures to salvage the Nigerian university system from rot and decay.
He said that the union firmly believes in the use of qualitative education to liberate and transform Nigeria from its current state of underdevelopment.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities on Monday, said it might be compelled to embark on another strike if the Federal Government failed to implement the December 22, 2020 Memorandum of Action signed with it prior to the suspension of the last strike.
The Zonal Coordinator of ASUU, Benin, Prof. Fred Esumeh, told newsmen while speaking on ‘Another Inevitable Round of Crisis in Nigerian Universities.’
Esumeh who did not disclose when the strike would commence, said they awaited the decision of the national body to give the directive.
Recall that in March 2020, ASUU embarked on a strike action following its disagreement with the Federal Government over the funding of the universities and ineffectiveness and discrepancies around the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System and others.
ASUU, however, developed the University Transparency and Accountability Solution to replace IPPIS and had several meetings with the Ministries of Finance, Education, Labour and Employment, and the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation before it was approved but yet to be implemented.
Prof. Esumeh said: “For the records, that strike action was declared on the 23rd of March 2020 over the federal government’s failure to honour the terms of an earlier 7th February 2019 MoA in which the federal government had freely agreed to conclude the details of the renegotiation of the FGN-ASUU 2009 agreement.
“The specific issues remain that the federal government deliberate delay in deploying the University Transparency and Accountability Solution as the payment platform for university staff, the non-payment of the due tranche of Earned Academic Allowances.
“Others are the non-release of the earlier agreed N40 billion fund for the revitalisation of public universities, the unwillingness to sign the draft of the renegotiated 2009 agreement, the continued non-payment of promotion arrears, the non-payment of withheld salaries and the non-remittance of deducted check-off dues of the union.”
Likewise, in a letter dated September 9,2021 and jointly signed by the Plateau State University branch chairman of ASUU, Dr Pamson Bentse and the Secretary,Samson Bitrus specifically accused Governor Simon Lalong led administration of failing to settle the national minimum wage arrears owed the lecturers within the first quarter of 2021 as well as failing to effect immediate release of N70 million as part payment of the Earned Academic Allowance arrears for the first tranche while the second tranche of N72 million will be due in October ,among others .
They also accused the government of failing to commence the payment of mainstreamed Earned Academic Allowance from January, 2021 and failing to commence the construction of staff quarters within the second quarter of 2021 as well as failing to complete the perimeter fencing of the university among other issues as contained in the Memorandum of Action.
In another development, the Sokoto Zonal Coordinator of Academic Staff Union of Universities, Jamilu Shehu, in Katsina decried deteriorating condition of many state owned universities.
He insisted that many states Governors were establishing the universities for political patronage rather than for the advancement of fields of knowledge.
As schools in Kaduna State prepare to reopen, all administrators and proprietors of public and private schools and other learning centres including Islamiya and Madrasas are to set up school-based security committees, the state government has directed.
While urging that students’ safety be ensured in schools, the state government said all schools management should inculcate Safe School Learning initiatives as directed by the Federal Ministry of Education.
The government, in a statement issued on Saturday evening by the Commissioner for Education, Dr Shehu Usman Muhammad, said members of the School Security Committee are to ensure proper monitoring of security apparatuses in place and prompt security alertness.
“The Ministry appreciated the support of all stakeholders in the education sector, security agencies, parents and guardians and the media, and calls on them not to relent in ensuring a safer learning environment for all learners at all levels in the state.
“The Ministry also expresses its profound gratitude to the general public for their resilience, understanding and continuous support during this trying period.
“Whilst 1st Phase of the resumption is already in school writing exams, the Ministry of Education is directing all Principals to make arrangements to receive JSS1, JSS2, SS1 and SS2 Boarding Students on Sunday, 12 September 2021 and Day Students on Monday 13 September 2021 for a period of fourteen (14) weeks for the term.
“Primary 1-6 are to resume on the 27 September 2021 for a period of twelve (12) weeks for the term,” he said.
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An Israeli-French-American Holocaust survivor and historian and a U.S. scientist specializing in gut bacteria were among the recipients this year’s Balzan Prizes, recognizing scholarly and scientific achievements, announced on Monday.
The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the brotherhood of man.
Saul Friedlander, who has taught at both the University of California, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv University, was awarded the prize for Holocaust and Genocide Studies for his work broadening the perspective on the history of the Holocaust.
Friedlander, 88, was born in Prague in 1932 in a non-religious Jewish family, which fled to France after the German occupation in March 1939.
His parents hid him in a Catholic boarding school near Vichy, where they were later captured and sent to Auschwitz.
With his parents’ agreement, Friedlander was baptized as a Catholic and later, out of his own conviction, considered becoming a priest. After he learned in 1946 that his parents had been killed at Auschwitz, Friedlander reclaimed his Jewish identity. He later said, “for the first time, I felt Jewish.”
Friedlander received the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction in 2008 for “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” the second volume in his history of Jews in Hitler’s Germany.
He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, after the publication of the first volume covering the period from 1933-39 and has also been awarded the Dan David Prize recognizing outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary research.
Friedlander was recognized for examining the persecution of all Jews in Europe, going beyond country-focused studies that had preceded him, and for making personal documents accepted in scholarly practice.
“His authority is special in the sense that he is both a scholar and a victim of the Holocaust. He says that you can study your own experiences in a critical way,” said Marjan Schwegman, a Dutch historian who announced the prize. “The way he integrates the voices of victims, perpetrators and bystanders in this narrative has changed the way historians write about the history of the Holocaust.”
The Balzan Foundation awards two prizes in the sciences and two in the humanities each year, rotating specialties to highlight new or emerging areas of research and sustain fields that might be overlooked elsewhere.
Recipients receive 750,000 Swiss francs ($815,000), half of which must be used for research, preferably by young scholars or scientists.
Jeffrey Gordon, a biologist and director of the Center for Genome Science at the Washington University in Saint Louis, was awarded for founding the field of human microbiome research and revolutionizing its role on human health and disease.
Prior to Gordon’s pioneering work in the 1990s, just 20 papers were published every decade on the microbiome, or the estimated 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of microbiota living in each adult, including on the skin, in the nose and gut, according to Jules Hoffman, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine who announced the award.
That expanded to 4,000 papers a decade after 2000 and is now up to 80,000 every 10 years. “It has become a very hot topic in science,” Hoffman said.
Gordon has expanded his research in the last decade to malnutrition, a primary reason for disease in children under 5, including the possibility of combating the deleterious impact of malnutrition through fecal microbiome transplants, Hoffman said.
Italian physicist Alessandra Buonanno and French physicist Thibault Damour were recognized for work that was instrumental in the detection of gravitational waves, which has helped to promote a type of astronomy that uses gravitational waves as “new, powerful messengers of the universe,″ the Balzan prize committee said.
Buonanno, 52, is director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, and holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Potsdam.
Damour, 70, has been a professor of theoretical physics at the Institut des Haute Etudes Scientifique in Bures-sur-Yvette France since 1989.
The Balzan Committee has not yet reached consensus on the prize for Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, but officials said they hope to do so before the prizes are presented in Rome on Nov. 18 by Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella.
Next year’s prizes will be awarded in moral philosophy, ethnomusicology, biomaterials for nanomedicine and tissue engineering and glaciation and ice-sheet dynamics.
The Federal Government has set a new date for the Nigeria @60 Jubilee Special Award ceremony.
According to a statement made available on Monday by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, which was signed by the minister’s media aide, Ifedayo Sayo, the ceremony will hold on September 30, 2021, at the Banquet Hall, Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The statement which was titled, “Nigeria@60 Award Ceremony Holds Sept 30,” read in part, “The Federal Government has fixed a new date for the Nigeria@60 Jubilee Special Award ceremony. It will take place on Thursday, September 30, 2021.”
The award was earlier scheduled to hold on September 3, 2021, before it was postponed by the committee charged with the planning of the ceremony.
The statement read that the award ceremony is planned as part of the Jubilee celebrations of the nation’s independence and it is designed to honour 60 notable Nigerians who have made an impact in the country.
The special award ceremony is being organized by the Ownership Subcommittee of the Nigeria@60 Committee in collaboration with a media and digital communication firm, Say It Loud Limited chaired by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo.
A day after being spurned by Kansas City Southern, Canadian National railroad is facing additional pressure from a major investor who wants CN to abandon its effort to buy the U.S. railroad.
The London-based investment firm TCI Fund — which owns about 5% of CN’s stock and about 8% of rival Canadian Pacific’s shares — said Monday that it is calling for a special CN shareholder meeting where it plans to nominate four new directors.
TCI has said it thinks CN should overhaul its board, get a new CEO and refocus its efforts on improving its own operations.
“History has shown that with the right leadership railroads can be improved quickly. TCI’s independent and highly skilled nominees, if elected, will help lead and guide the selection of a new CEO,” said Chris Hohn, TCI founder and managing partner.
TCI has said that a former CN executive who also served as Union Pacific’s head of operations for several years, Jim Vena, should be named CN’s next CEO.
Currently, CN is led by JJ Ruest, who has been president and chief executive since July 2018. Ruest has been with the railroad since 1996.
Canadian National officials did not immediately respond Monday to TCI’s call for a special meeting, but the railroad said Sunday that it would evaluate all of its strategic options after Kansas City Southern picked Canadian Pacific’s $31 billion offer over CN’s higher bid.
Canadian National had bid $33.6 billion to acquire Kansas City Southern but regulators rejected a key part of its plan last month.
Under the terms of its merger agreement with KCS, CN still has five business days to respond and possibly sweeten its offer.
A private utility is launching a more than $24 million water main replacement project in northwestern Indiana.
Indiana American Water plans to replace steel and cast-iron pipes in Gary that are older and have broken frequently, the (Northwest Indiana).
About five miles of pipe dating back to the early 1900s are expected to be retired while 11 miles of new water mains will be installed.
“When we purchased this system more than two decades ago, we knew significant investments were needed,” Indiana American Water President Matt Prine said. “Since that time, we have already invested more than $400 million in our water infrastructure in northwest Indiana.”
The investments are expected to improve the reliability of the utility’s distribution system and enhance system flows and firefighting capabilities across Lake and Porter counties, Prine added.
Gary Mayor Jerome Prince said investing in water infrastructure is critical to the success of Gary and all of northwestern Indiana.
“Water from Indiana American Water sourced from Lake Michigan is considered a premium product in the region and is a key part of the high quality of life we depend on every day,” Prince said.
Indiana American Water also has been working to remove about 55,000 lead service lines across the state that were commonly used in construction before World War II.
About two-thirds of the lead water lines are located in northwestern Indiana.
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