Kyambogo students riot over dirty toilets 

Oct 17, 2017

Students accused the university administration of abandoning them to “reeking lecture rooms and filthy broken toilets” with no running water for months

There was commotion at Uganda's second largest institution of higher learning today as students from the special needs and rehabilitation department at Kyambogo University held placards and others, sticks and tree branches and jammed the campus's walkways asking for better sanitation.

The melee lasted about two hours.

Students from the department accused the university administration of abandoning them to "reeking lecture rooms and filthy broken toilets" with no running water for months. 

 

Emmanuel Mwanyi, the special needs student representative to the university's guild representative council, said they had had enough of studying and living in "totally inhabitable" environments.

"The lecture rooms are dump, some corners water seeped through and are moldering. The place is bushy. At times we are in class and snakes crawl in," Mwanyi said, leading the mob of protesters.

When they had walked the entire university roads, venting their discontentment, they collected heaps of trash and dumped it at the entrance to the university's main building. 

Another student said they had engaged the GRC and the students' guild and Dean of Students, but no compromise had been reached.

The students were particularly irritated that they pay fees for rehabilitation and sanitation, only they don't see what the money is used for.           

New Vision visited North Hall, where the special needs students attend lectures, and it was a complete mess. 

The quadrangle is derelict. The toilets are mucky. The urinals are clogged and stinking. Trash is littered all over the compound. 

Almost all the basics are broken. 

But it is not just North Hall. The lecture rooms just beneath the Catholic Chapel at the university are equally a mess. The glasses are broken within the panes. The asbestos roof is heavily putrefied and the whole block looks gothic and haunted surrounded by shrubs.

New Vision could not reach vice-chancellor Prof. Elly Katunguka for a comment. 

But sources said students suspended the riot after the university administration promised to ‘clean' the hall.  

 

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