The Damongo Agric College in the West Gonja District of the Northern Region has been temporarily shutdown.
Students of the College for the past three weeks have boycotted lectures in protest over their unpaid allowances.
[contextly_sidebar id=”GsghnA1rb735uXZYVtpCdZOREGeTbeWu”]This follows a similar protest by their colleagues of the Kwadaso Agric College in the Ashanti Region, and other parts of the country.
Vice Principal of the Damongo College of Agric, Abdulai Mohammed, in a Citi News interview bemoaned the situation, and asked government to fix the problem.
“Our students are currently agitating for restoration of their allowances by the government, and for that matter they decided that may be one of the ways to see government to listen to them is to vacate campus.”
According to him, lecturers and office staff continue to report at work for other duties.
“This is the third week running, but staff and all lecturers are on campus and they are doing their normal duties, except that lectures are not ongoing just because of the absence of the students.”
He said authorities cannot manage the situation, saying, “We are actually helpless in the sense that, the decision that they took is a nationwide one, and that is what their union (ASU) has asked them to do.”
“On our part, we are ready to teach, but then once they are not there we can only attend to some other administrative duties. It is not the best of situations for us, but we still going on with the other activities around.”
It will be recalled that students of the Kwadaso Agric College also deserted their classrooms in protest of government’s failure to restore their allowances.
Earlier, some selected students of the nation’s five Colleges of Agric besieged the premises of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), and demanded the immediate release of their allowances.
The Ministry of Agriculture in an attempt to persuade them, announced that it had tabled before Cabinet the students’ request.
However, there are no updates of a possible restoration of the allowances, forcing the students to boycott lectures until further notice.
–
By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah/citifmononline.com/Ghana