By Chol Makol Riak
The administration of Dr. John Garang’s University has suspended the leadership of the students’ union at the university.
The suspension came after the leadership of the union and the general assembly had squabbles over what the assembly termed as the misuse of the union’s funds.
Speaking to No.1 Citizen Daily Newspaper on condition of anonymity, a student at Dr. John Garang University said the former chairperson had misused about 80% of SSP 955,000 of the union’s money donated by well-wishers.
“There is what we call the URC, they are students nominated from different colleges and their mandate is to oversee the activities of the executive including the chairperson, so recently what the URC did was to sit down with the executive including the chairperson of the union, they sit to ask the body as to what the plans for the students are, and they said they don’t have finances for their plans,” he said.
He added that “the URC asked the chairman why they were lacking money while they have received the donation of SSP 955,000, why are you not using that money for the welfare of the students. It was found out that Mr. Solomon used the money without knowledge from his cabinets”.
He added that Mr. Solomon had used more than 10% which is against the union’s constitution.
“According to the constitution of the students, the chairman is only allowed to use 10% of the unions’ donation if there are emergencies without approval from the dean of the student’s affairs or from the URC but when the calculation was done it shows that the chairman had used over 90% alone,” he said.
He stressed that the decision made by the university’s administration is welcomed.
For his part, Ajith Solomon Awan, former union’s chairperson dismissed the accusation by URC on his misuse of the union’s donation.
“Those allegations are there, we call them allegations because until the auditing is done, they will come up with the point that the money is wrongly used, because when we are talking about funds wrongly used, meaning that the funds were used for what they were not intended for,” Solomon said.
Ajith Solomon explained that he used some of the funds for facilitating students’ activities.
Meanwhile the university’s dean of the students’ affairs, Mr. Lual Ngor Lual said that the squabbles were not caused by the misused unions’ funds.
“The two bodies of the student’s union that is the executive and the URC (parliament) they disagreed over the issues of the constitution, one party is claiming certain responsibility and the other one claims the same and they could not understand themselves and the deanship of the student affairs was triggered to come in to law and orders,” Lual said.
However, Mr. Lual added that his office suspended the union and urged the students’ body to form a care taking leadership until elections are conducted.
“Due to the disagreement the deanship has made a decision and suspended the URC and the executive and even we have suspended the constitution,” Lual said.
Ajith Solomon Awan was elected as the chairperson of the student’s union in 2019 after a long captivity of Students Union and later Prof. Abraham Matoc authorized the stakeholders in line with the students’ leadership to resuscitate the union leadership.