The crisis rocking Government College, Umuahia, GCU, over the running of the school by the Trustees of Fisher Educational Development Trust, FEDT, has assumed a new dimension following the allegation that new trustees have been appointed by the Okwe Ilieze Nwodo-led team for the school.
An old boy of the college, Chukwudi Onwudinanti, had petitioned the Abia State House of Assembly, crying out that school fees at GCU, a supposed public school, had been increased to more than N1 million.
Onwudinanti also told the Abia State House of Assembly that brilliant children from poor homes could no longer get admitted into Government College because of outrageous school fees, among other claims.
Following the petition, the House Committee on Public Petitions, in March 2025, invited parties to the crisis and, after hearing their submissions, urged them to maintain the status quo to allow the House take a fair decision on the matter.
However, the lawyer to Chukwudi Onwudinanti, Mr. Ugochukwu Zik, has alerted the Abia State House of Assembly that the Fisher Educational Development Trust (USA and UK) have allegedly published the selection of a new board, contrary to the existing order of the House.
“Regrettably, while the National President of the GCUOBA issued a statement that the GCUOBA has suspended its intended inauguration of the new FEDT trustees and shall abide by the orders of the ABHA, the FEDT and its apologists in the USA and UK kept boasting that the ABHA is not a court of law that could stop her from inaugurating its new trustees,”; Zik said.
The counsel to the petitioner said that the disobedience of the Abia State House of Assembly order was an affront to the Assembly.
But during the hearing of the matter at the Abia State House of Assembly Committee on Public Petitions in March, the Co-Chairman of the Committee, Uchenna Okoro Kalu, and the members of the FEDT, who spoke through Onyema Nkele, denied many of the allegations brought against them in Onwudinanti’s petition.
