• Call for probe

•You can’t probe us, show us your evidence of payment -VC

By: Felix Onajite

Students of the National Open University of Nigeria, NOUN, are currently kicking over their inability to retrieve monies they left in the school portal’s wallet for which the new school leadership claimed were unable to be retrieved, NIGERIAN WITNESS reports. To this end, they have called on the National Assembly, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and other anti-corruption agencies to initiate probe into the activities that would have robbed them of their monies. The monies, when put together they claimed runs into hundreds of millions.

However, in a reaction to the students’ claims, Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu, the new vice-chancellor who introduced the changes that led to the alleged disappearance of the monies retorted that neither Nigerian Witness nor the “so-called students have the right to audit the university’s account in order to establish the amount of money accruable as a result of money in students’ wallets.”

The students in their petition to Nigerian Witness claimed that before now, the National Open University of Nigeria outsourced its website management to an IT company which managed all the activities of the school and the student information until the new vice-chancellor, Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu came in and faulted the process. The VCs argument was that the school spent a large junk of it monies to manage the web when according to him, the school has enough manpower to manage it in-house.

This led to the suspension of the contract and subsequently sparked off series of problems the students are currently facing.
“NOUN has under the current VC launched more than three different websites apart from the old www.noun.edu.ng. It started with www.nou.org, it moved to www.noun.net and then www.nou.edu.net. Never has any of them lasted more than a month before it was pulled down,” the students revealed.
Nigerian Witness gathered that when the students were finally able to access information on the portal, they saw all their details intact except monies they lodged into their wallets with the school.

The wallet is virtual account on NOUN’s portal where students lodge their monies in for future payment of fees, registration of courses, and registration of exams.
“Students pay in monies into their wallets more than they need to use in a semester for safety. Some rich students pre-fund their wallets as much as N100,000 or more. The monies are the ones the new management and their ICT collaborators have refused to reflect. The school authorities are claiming they could not retrieve the wallet details after they have retrieved the other students information. This we believe call for proper investigation.”
Some of the students interviewed claimed they had balances ranging from N45,000 to N25,000 left in their wallets. Others as well had as little as N1,000 or N5,000.

READ MORE HERE: http://witnessngr.com/noun-students-battle-vice-chancellor-over-missing-millions/

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