Faculty Of Agriculture: President and Senate Disagree on Skill Acquisition Programe, NAASITES to Suffer.

The adage, “when two elephants go head to head, the grass suffers” is not a myth but a reality. This is the current situation of students of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Ibadan as the disagreement between the Student’s Legislative Council and the Executive Arm of the student’s organisation of the faculty has led to many regrets and pain for the students.

On 14th April 2022, the Student Legislative Council held an emergency session and made public her resolution concerning a purported digital skill training proposed by the Afolabi Nasirudeen led executive council. Before the emerged plenary, the executive had released a broadcast of a digital skill training open to NAASITES and non-NAASITES at a fee of #1,000 to be paid into the private account of one Muhammad Akintayo.

In response to this act, the SLC released a 4-point resolution directing the president to halt all activities with regards to the digital skills training and advised that if any of such activities must eventually take place, it should only be made free and even recommended serving a letter of the query to the executive members involved.

The resolution read in part, “The legislative council frowns at the use of a private bank account for the intended association program” regardless of the reasons stated by the executive council.

The legislative council considered it an erroneous act with no basis at all.” Immediately, concerning the resolution of the house, the disciplinary committee swung to action and served the erring parties the query letter.

In response to the query letter the Executive body also released a rejoinder and announced the halt of the online training program and advised the legislative council to come up with a better idea to get the program back on its feet. In the rejoinder signed by the PRO and the President, the executive apologized for their error and gave reasons to justify why they took actions that were frowned at by the legislative council.

It states “We will also like to apologize for not getting the approval of the council before moving forward, it was an oversight. However, looking at the bigger picture of what everyone would gain from this training, the Council could have proposed a better way of going about the program rather than mandating us to make it free. Back to the resolution of the SLC that stated in no 2 that it frowns at the use of a private bank account for the intended association program since the school will not be in session when the training will be ongoing, the three (3) signatories to the association’s account would not be in the same location, hence, the difficulty in getting money for the intended purpose. We could have asked each individual to pay directly into each tutor’s account but we decided to anchor it because of coordination hence the use of a private account.
Also, a comprehensive report would be given about how the money was spent with the google form the applicants filled out to corroborate the report. we have decided that since the Council is also working with us in serving NAASITEs, they can kindly help us set up a committee that can* organize a (Free) 4 weeks Online Skills Training that would cover the 8 skills to be learnt by NAASITEs.”

The back and forth of the association’s principal actors have caused the program that was designed to benefit the students of the Faculty of Agriculture to be halted hence leaving the students in a helpless position.