All eyes on Gov Wike as Edo honours its first class students
offered automatic employment to the five best graduating students of their own university, after handing N1m to each of them at least to offset the trauma of fighting for excellence. Most students borrow and owe to make it to the finish line after many years of life as students.
In Edo, the five graduating students with first class honours were offered employment as graduate assistants by the university. A bank that does business with the state also offered them automatic employments. The governor said it was up to the students to choose which job to accept.
The Edo varsity VC also announced the sum of N2.5m to each of the two best graduating students with business plans (Aweni Mohammed Yahaya and Godwin Evbuomwan). He added that the best five graduating students will also form the first set of beneficiaries of the school’s Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) grants to testrun its agreement to collaborate with the University of Sunderland in Postgraduate studies and supervision.
The state government said the offers were to show that the state valued brains and to show other youths that good endeavours can pay off. Many in Rivers State said this is also the kind of motivation needed in the state. The Wike administration has cried out always against cultism, violence and other youth vices. Many say giving support to top brains in the state would show that good too pays in a state where most youths now think otherwise.
It was gathered that though Gov Wike did not attend the 2019 convocation event at the RSU, the names of the Rivers first class students were sent to the Govt House in PH but nobody knows how far the list got to. The
Governor was said to have got angry with the then Blessing Didia-led administration in the university and soon kicked him out after spate of cult-related killings and alleged employment racketeering.
Many students plead that now that the situation has calmed down, the governor could look into the list waiting for him. Rivers State for decades was classified as one of the educationally disadvantaged states and the federal and state government have pushed a lot of measures to shore up the state’s fortunes in education, and it seems to be paying off now.
Many thus think that encouraging first class graduands would help boost interest in academic excellence. Also, it is believed that banks and other big corporations that do big business with every state government always support the states at such moments as Sterling Bank did to Edo. In Rivers State, Zenith Bank is believed to do big business with the Rivers State government. The state’s IGR netting in 2019 is average of N12.7BN. The banks that handle this must be seen as mega-partners to the government and are thus needed to support the govt in offering automatic jobs to the state’s first class students, just six of them. This is how it is done everywhere else, though it is the state government that will put the demands on the table.