The newly elected executive of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) have been sworn into office. The ceremony took place at the Executive Hostel of the Ghana Institute of Management and Publication Administration (GIMPA) amidst protestations by some members of the out gone executive that they had not been part of the planning of ceremony. The security intervened to calm the situation paving the way for the event. Speaking at the swearing-in ceremony, the Rector of GIMPA, Professor Agyeman Yaw Badu exalted students to remember that advocacy had shifted from rancour and street protests. He said lobbying, dialogue and negotiation were the new and most effective ways achieving results for the union. Prof. Yaw Badu called on the new executive to endeavour to truly represent the interest of students, reminding them that their task was herculean considering the teeming number of students who have to seek alternative routes to study because they cannot gain admission into the traditional universities. The new president, Wonder Madilo in his acceptance speech, said he viewed his election not as a victory but a challenge – a challenge embedded in debilitating problems confronting students of Ghana. He promised to “provide a result-oriented leadership aimed at solving these problems.” “Only leadership - that intangible combination of gifts, discipline, information, circumstance, courage, timing, will and divine inspiration - can lead us to the city of self-actualization,” he stated. Having the elections on a campaign of “Action beyond the talk,” Mr Madilo said he was encumbered by his creed and conscience to work assiduously towards the realization of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE). “Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where children beg with a suffocating breath to survive and endure such frustrating hardships [as ‘kayayei’] then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and in deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of the Ghanaian child,” Madilo emphasised. “We shall persistently resist anything which militates against the Ghanaian child through the philosophy of non-violence. We shall fearlessly and fiercely lead a campaign to ensure that the capitation grant is not substituted for the FCUBE,” he noted. The NUGS President commended the immediate past executive for their hard work in addressing the concerns of students, promising to raise the bar.