Police in Mbarara has spent the better half of Friday morning engaged in running battles with students of Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) who staged a protest at the university.
Police led by the Mbarara city police commander John Rutagira moved around the university chasing after the rioting students and putting out burning tyres on the campus.
The students some of whom had sticks crossed through the referral hospital which forced the hospital superintendent Celestine Barigye to call for deployment. The protest comes a month after the semester officially started for both new and some continuing students.
There has been industrial action taken by public universities staff across the country. The students have expressed their dissatisfaction with the on-going academic staff strike which has resulted in not having classes for the last one and more month they have been at the university.
The students are demanding for physical lectures, and if online, they want the university to provide free internet. They say they will keep on striking until the university administration works on their demands. Yesterday evening, the university's student guild president-elect, Mariam Iculet Arikosi held a closed-door meeting with the university management and agreed upon five issues which she communicated to students in a letter.
Among the issues is the conducting of physical classes, the extension of the semester with appropriate scheduling of lectures and exams, one-off supplementary exams during the academic year 2020/21 for individuals who missed final exams of semester II, access to all university premises like the library, computer labs, physical classes, no additional tuition fees, functional fees and accommodation fees to people staying in university halls of residence.
Arikosi, asked students to exercise great restraint and logic in their next course of action to facilitate a way forward. Despite the meeting and the letter, the students remained defiant and held a protest.
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