The Federal Polytechnic, Ado Ekiti, has splashed N560,000 on 56 students of the institution who had the best results in the different departments of the institution for the 2019/2020 academic session.

In the same manner, the Rector, Dr Hephzibar Oladebeye, threatened that tough sanctions awaited students who engaged in criminal and anti-social activities including cultism, rape and examination malpractices.

The beneficiaries of the awards comprising 28 National Diploma 2 and 28 Higher National Diploma 2 students, who qualified for the honour on completion of their ND 1 and HND 1 classes as best students last session, received N10,000 each and certificate of merit during the matriculation ceremony for fresh students for 2020/2021 session.

Oladebeye, said, “In a bid to encourage and instil hard work and seriousness in our students for tenacious attention to their studies, the polytechnic has put in place an incentive to motivate fresh students”.

He told the freshers that the scholarship awards and certificate of merit were “to serve as motivation for all freshmen to help you strive towards excellence quite early so that it would be your turn for recognition during next year’s matriculation ceremony”.

The rector advised the 6,617 fresh students comprising 4,522 ND and 2,095 HND students, “to continually remember that the distance between today’s ceremony and convocation is quite wide and it is important that the journey ends successfully.

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“For this to happen, you need to be regular in attendance at lectures, carrying out all your assignments, shunning all deviant behaviour and other vices that can expose you and others to danger.

“You are therefore advised to keep to the matriculation oaths and steer clear of any form of activity that will truncate the academic calendar, thereby elongating your stay unnecessarily on this campus”.

The rector said that FPA would continue to maintain “zero-tolerance for all anti-social behaviour such as examination misconduct, prostitution, cultism, sexual harassment hooliganism, gangsterism, corruption, yahoo yahoo (internet fraud) of any kind and any kind of social vices. Emphasis is tenaciously laid on modest and decent dressing.”

Oladebeye urged the fresh students to key into the entrepreneurship programme, saying the school was “unrelenting in its drive to produce industry-compliant graduates and fulfilled entrepreneurs in line with the government’s policy of ensuring that today’s graduates aspire to be job creators rather than job-seekers”.