By Kenneth Onuoha
Five students of Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki on Wednesday, February 10, 2021, collapsed at the institution’s permanent site during a stampede.
365Daily gathered that the incident occurred when students rushed to access the school’s ICT centre to write an exam.
The university had adopted the Computer Based Test (CBT) for some General Studies (GST) courses.
GST is course taken by all students of the institution, irrespective of the department or faculty.
A source told 365Daily that the hall where the examination was to be taken was too small for the mammoth crowd of students that were to write the course.
It was also gathered that all the students from the four campuses of the university, were told to come to the ICT centre to write the exam.
“There was poor planning of the exams. The hall had just about 500 computers and the students to write the exams were over 1,000,” 365Daily was told.
The source said the university administration should have staggered the exams, so that the hall will not be crowded, but they failed to do so.
“Today’s exams has again exposed the sorry state of our state university as many students did not take part in the examination and only 15 per cent of EBSU students wrote the exam.
“Knowing fully well that a room apartment, which was paraded as ICT centre, cannot accommodate all the students of the institution to write GST 101 and 102. They should have typed this exams and make photocopies so as to get to all the students, but they didn’t because they paraded today’s exam to be a computer based one,” the source lamented.
Continuing, the source disclosed that “At about 4:15pm, the invigilators came out to announce that the exam, which has been written midway, had been cancelled.”
The source noted further that while struggling to go inside the one room ICT hall to write the exam at least five students collapsed.
“The worst part of it was that there was no Medical centre to rush these students who were already struggling for survival”, the source said.
Reacting to the incident, the Students Union Government (SUG) President, Abanni Samson, expressed deep regret over the incident, which he described as totally avoidable.
“As leaders and firstly students, the SUG shared in the pain of all EBSU students and on this note we assure everyone that never again will EBSU students under our leadership be made to go through such horror in the name of writing any exam or undertaking any academic activity, including bad experiences with the consultancy unit of the university.
“The planning could have been better, to prevent the mayhem that was recorded today. I am personally sorry for all who got hurt in any way,” Abanni said.