Students Fume as University Power Outage Goes Third Week

Luqman Akintunde reports

The students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria have registered their ordeals as electricity blackout on the campus entered it third week.

This was gathered in an exclusive interviews with our correspondence in the weekend adding that it is an unpleasant experience and that the management should not handle it alone rather with public interventions.

In her disappointed point, Lois Anichukwu of 400L, Political Science and Int’l Studies lamented that she left school immediately she finished her first semester exams in the early May with the sole aim of returning earlier before the resumption date in order to do something on her project prior to academic boom but came to met the campus on total blackout which really hindered her preparations to move as planned.

“Apart from my studies, I am a small business entrepreneur who largely depends on Mobile Phone as shop because social media serve my reach to the customers and at times calls do it better. But since my return I have not been able to reach out to my customers as normal. So, mine is two sides of the negativity brought by the power outage” she added.

Lois mentioned that another pathetic scene of the experience is that it started while the hundred level students were writing exams and the were largely disturbed because as they were searching for where and how to charge gadgets their plans to prepare ahead the exams become truncated.

Another student from the faculty of engineering, Simpa Fadila explained that the incident in the first time was not really a surprise because her seniors have once told her that such thing is normal on ABU campus during exams but later turned a shock when it persisted without breaking. “I was confident to cope with the situation in the first day since many of my senior colleagues on campus do say that ABU light and water do fluctuate during exams but was flabagasted in the next days”.

Fadila narrated that she doesn’t expect such been a hundred level who is still new to the system because some of us depend on soft copy materials for our studies both on phones and laptops adding that she has no knowledge about the efforts of the management to restore the light back on campus so far.

In another note, Suliyat Sanni and Thomas both from the faculty of social sciences agreed that the deed has been done already and that they have no claim against the issue even as it is uncalled for but they are already done with the exams and now they can manage themselves unlike during the examinations when everything and everywhere was like a hell on the earth.

Meanwhile, many efforts to clear the air about a rumour that the University has put up its eggs in a basket and sent to China for possible solutions was futile but an official who pleaded anonymity said it clearly that the situation is more than the capacity of the institution adding that going to China for possible solution has not been discussed with anyone yet therefore the rumour might be far from been true.