The Peoples Democratic Party in Ondo State has raised the alarm over what it termed the imminent collapse of the state-owned polytechnic, the Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, Owo (RUPIGO).
It said history would be unkind to Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu if he ruined all institutions he inherited in the state.
The Ondo PDP said the institution had become a ghost of itself even though Akeredolu hails from Owo town.
Ondo PDP spokesman, Kennedy Peretei, in a statement, claimed that the polytechnic’s Staff School that operated for more than 25 years was closed down “for no good reason” while the staff and students were left in the cold.
Peretei alleged that subventions to the school had been reduced while the school kept recruiting new staff from the governor and his aides.
He said: “Workers have not been promoted in the last three years. Even jobs that are awarded by TETFUND are hijacked by the governor’s cronies. The entire place has been reduced to something near hell.
“As it stands, the school has more staff than students because of an increase in school fees, which students cannot afford.
“On Monday, 1st November 2021, students of the school blocked the convoy of the governor, displaying placards with various inscriptions, appealing to the governor to pay the arrears of the polytechnic staff salaries that are more than ten months. How does the governor expect these workers to feed their families?
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“The woes that have accompanied Akeredolu’s misrule are endless and the people are suffocating daily.”
Governor Akeredolu, who responded through his Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Donald Ojogo, said the PDP had failed in its role as a watchdog by forgetting that it was the immediate past PDP administration that sacked over 30 workers of RUPIGO.
Akeredolu stated that three of such sacked workers died while he reinstated the sacked workers.
According to him, “the good people of Ondo are not suffering from amnesia as the PDP strives to make them seem.”
He said it was the PDP administration that killed the institution by owing over 13 months’ salaries spanning from 2010.
He added: “There was no subvention to that school and others, including Rufus Giwa Polytechnic except AAU, Akungba simply because a governor’s brother was at the helm of affairs.
“We can recall with pains how the last PDP administration deliberately killed tertiary education to the extent that a former vice-chancellor had to resign his appointment in protest that Mimiko starved the school of funds.
“The situation was not different in all other tertiary schools until we came on board. They were rather, the killers of tertiary education in the state before we came on board.
“There could not have been a better way to kill a sector than the non-accreditation of all courses in a so-called medical university, then.”
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