Day 1: OCCUPY UNEC PROTEST against erratic Power
Supply
Last night was unlike other nights. Well, a few things
happened like other nights. The school generator was
ignited by the normal 7:00pm. Students scurried to their
rooms to get their clothes ironed, to power their phones up
to at least one bar, to watch the last episode of Game of
Thrones. They scurried because even the rats knew that by
9:00pm, the lights would go off and would be taken to the
other hostels that didn't have light by 7:00pm. This has
been a tradition within the campus lately. A tradition of
sharing light among the 7 hostels in UNEC. The result of
this, has been that each hostel gets to have light for only 2
impoverished hours every day. Let me put this in
perspective, out of 24 hours, a student of UNEC gets power
supply for merely 2 hours. 2 hours to charge phones, iron
clothes, get aeration, charge laptops for the different
projects and term papers he has been given. The rest of the
22 hours, a UNEC student spends fantasizing about the next
2 hours he would get the next day. Fire was discovered
thousands of years ago, but UNEC students live like early
men, like cave men. Last night when the customary outage
of light by 9:00pm came, it did not come without a
backlash. Not just a backlash. Students in the famous
Kenneth Dike hostel began shouting from their rooms,
throwing garbage down the stairs, a rather rustic way to
begin a peaceful protest. Next, they became a mob Angry
and charged, they stomped out of the hostel, and the
protest began. Students from the Mbonu Ojike hostel
joined. Together they marched to the Manuwa bustop.
Seeing their rage, the generator people had to cut power
entirely, fearing for their own safety. The mob marched to
the Staff Quarters, to the DVCs house, that of the Dean of
Students' Affairs. Nobody was home. Discontented, they
marched to the school gate, nearly pulled down the
sculpted lion in front of the gate along with the bold
inscription: To Restore the Dignity of Man. This was
students taking their dignity by force, by their own hands.
They obstructed traffic in front of the school gate. Soon,
security operatives came begging the students to go back
into school. An hour later, the students had retired into their
hostels, breathing off the steam of an angry and successful
protest and telling stories of how it went, and how in other
universities, students paid less school fees and yet enjoyed
steady power supply. In all, the protest went successfully,
except that some students used that opportunity to sexually
harass many female students. An act of cowardice in the
midst of such a show of bravery. The protest soon died
down and gave way to the cool passage of the night breeze.
The next day. Today. There are police officers in front of
the gate, looking suspiciously at any and every student. I
hope they see light to charge their walkie-talkie phones. I
hope they see light, especially if they stay till nighttime and
are caught in the midst of what some students are calling
the bloodiest protest to come if the school authorities don't
do something about the power problem. Now, there are
rumors that the VC is irate and has vowed to shut down the
campus if another protest occurs. For now, the students
are sparing no comments on that. There are firecrackers
and matches they need to hide well before nighttime.
