GIJ General Assembly members call for SRC executives to be prosecuted at national court

Some members of the Students Representative Council (SRC) General Assembly of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) are calling for the heads of some student leaders for allegedly mismanaging and squandering student funds.

Key among those mentioned is the SRC President, Joseph Agbezuke.

Speaker of the General Assembly, Sandra Emefa Dziwornu has also been brought under pressure for a decision she made at a recent GA meeting.

At the said meeting to consider the SRC’s budget statement, a contention arose pertaining to a new composition of the Assembly in which a motion was moved for the rejection or otherwise of the idea with a “yeah yeah” or “nay nay” respectively.

The GA Speaker, using “discretionary powers” moved in favor of members who voted for a new composition of the General Assembly even though according to the members, majority were against it.

In a petition to the SRC Judicial Committee dated Tuesday, February 18, 2020, the members described the action as one that “amounts to self-serving and projecting one’s proclivities against the will of the people”

Meanwhile, the GA members are also questioning their SRC for spending GHC 58,000.00 to build a digital studio.

A member of the General Assembly, Efo Korku Mawutor, who spoke to UniversNews, threatened to take serious actions against the SRC President and Speaker over alleged acts of unconstitutionality.

“For us at the GA we are calling for her [Speaker] head. We want her to resign or we’ll impeach her. But before we impeach her, we want the Judicial Committee to help us go back to sitting and get a headcount and get the votes of General Assembly members to be the real votes that is seen as the ruling. After that, we will impeach her if she doesn’t resign and after impeaching her, we will go after the President to imprison him too.

He also said that the studio that was built by the SRC, upon examination, houses an air-conditioner and a console as the only new bits – items that could not have amounted to such costs.

Other undertakings by the SRC were also mentioned to include the funds mismanaged.

According to him, the SRC said they purchased, among other things, lover’s benches each costing GHC 500.00, a table at GHc400.00, which later probing revealed to them that those items cost way less than the House was made to believe.

Also, an amount of GHc1,000.00 was allocated to the SRC President’s office to supposedly procure a desktop computer among other things that were never purchased.

He again stated that some discrepancies could be found in the obligatory amounts paid to some student unions.

The monies paid to NUGS, we could check and we realized that the monies that our external affairs commissioner quoted as paying to NUGS is 20 percent more than what they actually paid to NUGS. This is lying. It is corruption. Based on these things, that is why they don’t want to account to the same GA that approved their budget.

He intimated that the suggestion to constitute a new General Assembly was just an attempt of a cover-up.

He then called for the issue to be taken outside the shores of the institution and for the student leaders involved to be prosecuted at the national level in order to finally, end the cycle of mismanagement in all institutions all the country over.

They’re spending our money without approval and that in itself is a crime against our constitution. And it is stealing; it is thievery for which we can get people prosecuted at a regular national court and that is what some of us are pushing for because, until one SRC President from one of these institutions in the country gets prosecuted in a national court and gets imprisoned, nothing will change.

Efo Mawutor also vowed to put his “life on the line” to see that whoever is involved is brought to book.