No fewer than 185 students of the Baze University, Abuja, have been slammed with suspension by the authorities of the institution over unpaid fees.
It was gathered on Thursday that the affected 185 students are under the Federal Government-sponsored Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) scholarship, which was awarded to them last year.
The distraught undergraduates were said to have been thrown out of the university when they were about to write their examination on Digital Entrepreneurship with course code, GEN 201.
They were among over 500 undergraduates, who were already seated at the multi-purpose hall of the university to write the examination when a lecturer called out all of them to leave the hall.
It was learned that the university management did not notify any one of them in advance, only to throw them out of the examination hall on Thursday.
The PAP students were said to have also complained that their parents were not also put on notice, a development that has left many of the young students bemoaning their fate while their colleagues were in the hall.
They lamented that while they stood in the corridor to write the examination, they were not allowed to sign the attendance for the general paper even as they were not also sure whether the examination would be recorded for them.
The institution, they said, truncated their examination after a long period of preparations for the examination with prior notification to the parents.
One of the affected students said, “On Thursday 8th December 2022, all students offering the course titled, Digital Entrepreneurship (GEN 201), amounting to over 500 students in number convened at the Baze University multi-purpose hall to sit the final exams for this semester.
“All pre-exam practices were duly conducted; we were searched, allocated our seat numbers and schooled on the rules by which we were to be bound for the duration of the exam.
“We were seated and ready to start at any moment when a lecturer informed us that he will be calling out a list of names, and if your name or matriculation number is mentioned you are to walk to the end of the hall.
“Naturally, we guessed that the aim of this was to filter out the students that had not met the attendance requirements to write the exam but this theory was struck out when we noticed a pattern; only amnesty students were being called out.
“We were then escorted out of the hall and taken to the registration block where we were informed through a “messenger” that we have henceforth been suspended by the school from writing the final exams because we have not paid our school fees for this semester.
“This was all the information we were given as we were left to scatter about the school. Some of us chose to write the exam as it was being held online. We are unsure whether it will be recorded as we did not get the opportunity to sign the mandatory physical attendance in the hall before we were escorted out.”
A senior staff of the presidential amnesty office stated in confidence that the office could not pay the schools because of the paucity of funds.
The source added that the PAP office had dispatched a delegation led by the head of reintegration to stop the curious conduct of the university.
