Hope Eghagha

Hope Oghenerukevbe Eghagha (born 4 September 1959) is a Nigerian professor of English Literature and Literary Analysis in the Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, currently researching on dramatic theory and criticism. He is a playwright, poet, novelist, biographer and a columnist in The Guardian newspaper (Nigeria) editorial board. Through his weekly newspaper opinion articles, he explores complex challenges in Nigeria. Quotes “I almost regretted coming to public service. As a lecturer in UNILAG, I never changed scores for students. I did not come to government so as to defraud by putting fake names on the list.” “Our people have an adage that if you catch a thief from your farm and you don’t call him a thief, he will call you a thief. To start with, I met the consultant that was doing the job here when I came. So to say I brought him in is not true at all. Two, the e-payment was introduced to curb fraud in the system. “I taught in UNILAG before I came in to office, and I can tell you confidently that none of my kids enjoyed the bursary. When I resumed on January 2, 2009, I found out that money had been released by the state government but most students never got them. Two days after, students came here and protested that they had not been paid their bursaries. I then sat them down, listened to them and asked them questions. Some of those people that protested then are being employed by the state government now, and they are now the ones fighting those racketeers.” “I then decided we had to reform the scholarship board and particularly the bursary system. That accounts for the e-payment system whereby we deal directly with the students. The board advertises, and students respond this time not by proxies. Each student fills in his or her particular on a form we have provided on the board’s website.” “We decided to publish the names because each year, some people will tell their parents that they didn’t get money. Publishing the names was my initiative because we wanted to tell the public that these students that we pay were not ghosts. Some of them get paid and claimed they were not paid. “Many of them did not know we were going to scrutinise the process. So, the first year we published everybody names that these are Delta State students. There was somebody who registered over 100 times. So that is the battle we have been fighting since then,” “There are some students that have not yet been paid because they used the old bank account numbers. In some cases, the name of the accounts did not match the applicants of the bursary. The board has their statistics. Since I’ve come here, any year any students wasn’t paid, it is either the students did not register properly or that there was an error. Students send me SMS making one complaint or the other and I would get back to the board to say: ‘look into this case’.”