Ill Maintained Maintenance by Omolola Afolabi

Maintenance is a private hall with bunches of buildings making it up. It is meant to entertake just female students but to nail it all on the head, it is no underemphasising calling it female students’ village. The administration therein is not far from provincial. Located at the entrance of the university, with boulevards of ornamental plants beautifying or maybe concealing  the rot that goes on in here too. Many students get stranded and become 'homeless after concluding their first years on campus {though a good number of students do not even get bed spaces as freshmen in the first place} at Angola or Mozambique halls of residence and are therefore left to find their 'squareroots' wherever they see fit.The level at which accommodation is scarce in OAU calls for desperation and everyone scrambles for whatever space available. As a matter of fact, even finding a rhino’s tooth does not pose as much difficulty as getting living spaces on our so called prestigious ivory tower.
In this desperation, OAU’s female students’ village is therefore flooded year in year out with prospective tenants. The crux of the matter and the real bone of contention that makes one furious is the state of the space which is not commiserate with the exorbitant rent the spaces are given out at. The owners make quite mammoth amount of money but offer quite infinitesimal service to the tenants (female students). When one steps into maintenance, the sight that greets one is a long winding dirt hovering around fogging your sight from seeing clearly and dusty road which is ought to be well constructed but with contours and deep holes hampering cars and 'okada' from moving freely. More so, no visible general drainage that will curb the natural occurrence of flooding and erosion. Now, structures sprout like grasses every other day, each owner trying to outdo the  other by constructing sprawling structures and by offering better facilities than the previously constucted ones. Comprador buorgeoises and very self serving capitalists  whose singular intent is maximization of profits at the expense of the students while robbing the same of their monies with their rents.
The most unpalatable experience one can have in Maitenance is to come visiting when the rains are at their utmost intensity. Of course, we cannot stop nature from doing its work, but we can learn to stop it from getting us stuck in muddy pools. The roads leading to this supposedly luxurious hostels are in utterly deplorable states, the roads become very swampy and waterlogged during incessant  rainfalls, they are far from welcoming, maybe the message they silently convey to visitors are: “stay your houses”.Walking successfully on these roads requires a pedestrian raising up trousers or long skirts, whichever case, bikemen motorists or 'okada' men seeking alternative routes or driving with expert caution wading gingerly through the puddle of muddiness.
Many female OAU students prefer living in the students’ village because it poses less security threats than residences in town,  that is outside campus. Coupled with this is the stable powers supply and its proximity to the campus area itself. It is true the university has little or no influence about policies in Maintenance and its state of affairs; and the property is only leased out for a period of time but there could be the need to look into it in order to protect the interest of her students, her stakeholders. Now that the rent has been increased in all the 15{and still counting}hostels, this calls for rectitude, extirpate interest in these hostels, a balanced increase in maintenance, welfarism and ultimately, improvement in the state of the roads so we can at least get deserving dividends for the rent our parents get through their toils and some of us, through personal hustles We also hope when the properties are passed on to the university and they are left to be overseen by the university management, we hope to see visible changes and better welfare packages as the mother hen has now taken over tending her own chicks, the hawks must sway.

About the author: 

Omolola Afolabi is an arts enthusiast,a social critic,a broadcast and print journalist and a budding academic,she currently studies at Obafemi Awolowo University.