Students on Federal Government scholarship reportedly begging for food in Russia

Failure by the Federal Government to pay allowances of 322 Nigerian students on scholarship in Russia forces them into begging and illegal jobs, punch reports. When Moyosore Ojuri lost her father at age 11, her world practically came crashing. Her father had promised to give her the best of education. Although he was not a millionaire, the man had struggled to enrol her in one of the top private secondary schools in Lagos.

But with the death, her mother, a retired civil servant, could not pay her tuition when due. Luckily, the authorities of her school recognised the young lady’s academic exploits and gave her family the concession to pay her tuition in installments. Even with that, her mother had difficulty doing so as she occasionally ran into debts. Ojuri passed the series of tests and interviews and was given admission to study Metallurgical Engineering at the Volgograd State Technical University, Russia. On touching down at the Domodedovo International Airport, Moscow, Russia on September 22, 2012, Ojuri concluded that her pains and frustration had come to an end. Nigeria has BEA for undergraduate and post-graduate studies with Russia, Cuba, Morocco, Algeria, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Serbia, Macedonia, China, and Mexico. Under the arrangement, the Federal Government pays for the upkeep of the students, while the countries where the scholarship award is tenable provides the tuition. Two years after, Ojuri has a different story to share. Speaking with our correspondent on the telephone from Volgograd, she says that the Federal Government has since abandoned the BEA scholars to starve to death.

According to her, for eight months running now, the over 322 promising Nigerian students on the BEA initiative in the former Soviet Union have not been paid a dime by the government. Each of the beneficiaries’ monthly stipends for feeding is $500, while their annual allowance for medicals and clothing is $450 each. But from January till date, none of these allowances have been paid by the Nigerian government, despite repeated appeals and other forms of representations to the Nigerian Embassy in Moscow and the Federal Ministry of Education in Abuja.

Following the non-remittance of funds, Ojuri and her Nigerian colleagues, of late, have no choice but to borrow money as a survival strategy from their fellow African students enjoying similar BEA.

The 20-year-old asks rhetorically, “We are not private students. We came to Russia on the bill of the Federal Government. Why haven’t the authorities paid our stipends and other allowances for eight months now? For how long shall we continue to borrow money?”

The youngster, who says she has a huge debt on her neck at present, notes that their colleagues from other countries are no longer comfortable lending them money.

She adds, “On many occasions, I have had cause to go to class on an empty stomach. Getting money for transportation from my hostel to school has become very problematic. More worrisome is the fact that I will soon be homeless as my hostel fees will expire at the end of August. We are grateful to the Federal Government for the scholarship opportunity, but there is no sense in leaving us here to starve to death in a foreign land.”

Findings by our correspondent reveal that the inability to get work permit by foreign students in Russia is further compounding their problems. So, how do they survive the starvation and hard times in the Eurasian country?