Student Government Board to hear African Students Organization request again tonight

The Student Government Board will hear a request tonight from Pitt’s African Students… The Student Government Board will hear a request tonight from Pitt’s African Students Organization, three weeks after the group withdrew its request for money to fund the Wazobia cultural event.

This time, the African Students Organization has provided more documentation for its request and will not include a funding request for comedian Don’t Jealous Me, which the group will likely submit at a later date.

The organization withdrew the $10,079.14 request for Wazobia at the Jan. 31 SGB meeting after the Board raised concerns about documentation for two parts of the request: supplies the group intended to purchase from a thrift store and the fee and travel funding for the comedian.

The group wanted to bring to campus British comedian Don’t Jealous Me, who is of Nigerian descent, along with a pair of acrobats and three fashion designers for different parts of the event. The group also requested money for supplies its members wanted to purchase from thrift stores.

Board members objected to part of the request because of an email included in the group’s paperwork. The email, sent to Don’t Jealous Me, had a line blacked out. But the line was still legible, Allocations Committee Chair Michael Nites said. According to Nites, the email said the group could not get money for Don’t Jealous Me’s flight and asked that the comedian quote a new fee because he would have to pay for the flight.

ASO’s business manager, Inatimi Oguara, later said that she had blacked out a line in the email to Don’t Jealous Me. Funding rules in the Board’s Allocations Manual do not allow SGB to fund international flights.

Don’t Jealous Me wrote back with a new, higher price. The group’s request on Jan. 31 did not include the cost of the international flight as a separate line item, but it did include the email exchange with Don’t Jealous Me.

The email was sent from the Wazobia planning committee’s email account, separate from ASO’s general account. Both Oguara and ASO President Onaopemipo Dina declined to identify the author of the email.

On the WPTS Campus Roundtable radio show on Feb. 1, Dina said that six members of the Wazobia planning committee had access to that email account. Oguara said that neither she nor Dina is on the committee, which is separate from the group’s leadership.

Dina and Oguara will not identify the members of that committee, and the committee does not have a public website or Facebook page.

Board President James Landreneau, Nites and Dina have all refused requests to provide a copy of the email exchange with the performer, redacted or otherwise.

At the Jan. 31 meeting, after discussing the request, the group withdrew it to make revisions.

Landreneau later attributed the problems with the request to a miscommunication between the group and the Board, as well as problems with the documentation of other portions of the group’s request.

“There was a lot of confusion over what paperwork to turn in, and we did not have all of the documentation,” he said.

Oguara said that the group will not request funding for Don’t Jealous Me’s travel when it submits its paperwork in the future. Instead, she said that the group will raise funds to fly the comedian to Pittsburgh.

When the Board hears the request tonight, it will be much smaller than the $10,079.14 amount of three weeks ago. The submission will not include the request for moneyfor the comedian, which the group will likely submit in the near future.

The group requested $3,750 to pay for an acrobat team and three designers at last Thursday’s Allocations Committee meeting. Nites said the committee approved $1,250 for the three designers and denied $2,500 for the acrobats because the committee couldn’t justify spending that much money on a 20- to 30-minute performance.

The committee also approved $535.60 for airfare and $866.16 for lodging for two designers, $292.80 for security for the event and $615.86 for supplies and decorations. The committee denied $100 for ground transportation for two designers because of a lack of documentation.

The changing request

African Students Organization originally submitted a funding request for the event on Jan. 11 and withdrew it after speaking with the Allocations Committee.

Oguara said that the Allocations Committee did not bring up the international flight as an issue in the original request. The committee asked the group to provide more documentation for the acrobats’ and the comedian’s contracts. Oguara also said that the group needed to provide more information to the Allocations Committee about the items the group intended to purchase from thrift stores.

Landreneau said that the Jan. 11 request included $732 for international airfare for the comedian, which was not included in the Jan. 26 request.

The Jan. 11 request did not differentiate between who would be paid how much in order to come to campus, but Landreneau said the group originally requested $5,696.28 to pay for the performers and designers. ASO requested $7,350 to pay for the performers and designers on Jan. 26 in a request that did not include the $732 international flight line item.

After the group withdrew the Jan. 11 request, Oguara said that she talked with a number of people about how best to document the request, including Board member Halim Genus.

Oguara said Genus first brought up the issue of travel for the comedian, whose international travel was included as a line item in the group’s initial request. When Genus and the group brought the issue to Nites’ attention, he said that the Board could not fund international travel.

Genus said he advised members of the group that they should contact the comedian, tell him that they could not fund his flight, and ask that the comedian “adjust his honorarium accordingly.”

Genus said he “did not see anything wrong with that.”

After that, someone from the Wazobia planning committee sent the email to Don’t Jealous Me.

Nites and Dina said that Oguara printed a copy of the email in the Allocations office when she submitted the request, and Oguara was advised there to black out the line. Oguera confirmed that she was asked to black out the line, but would not say by whom.

Oguara said that members of the Allocations Committee brought up the email documentation at the committee’s Jan. 26 meeting, along with the issues about documentation for the group’s supply purchases.

“They did bring up the issue. They said that they have to reduce the honorarium because we cannot include international travel in the honorarium,” she said.

Ryan Gayman, the Allocations Committee liaison for the African Students Organization, confirmed that he sent an email to Oguara on Jan. 27 after the group’s meeting with Allocations the night before, providing information about the committee’s decision for the group’s request.

The email said the Allocations Committee chose to deny in full the costs of the honorarium, transportation and lodging for the performer Don’t Jealous Me because of “false information” the group provided.

The email also said the committee chose to fund in full the costs associated with the designers for the event, because the committee members felt the designers and fashion were the main component of the event.

Gayman declined to comment further on the email. Nites said that Allocations liaisons are responsible for communicating the decisions of the Allocations Committee to the groups they work with.

Oguara said that Gayman was not in the room at the Jan. 26 Allocations Committee meeting when the committee went over the request.

Dina said that she had spoken to Oguara before the Jan. 31 SGB meeting about the email exchange with Don’t Jealous Me and saw an unaltered version of that exchange on Jan. 30. Dina said that she focused on the reasons for funding various parts of Wazobia when preparing to speak before the Board at the Jan. 31 meeting.

International travel

The controversy of the request centers on an Allocations Manual rule that prohibits funding for international travel. But that rule does not keep a group from potentially funding travel anyway by having a performer’s or speaker’s honorarium, the fee for the person’s time at a performance or event, cover the travel.

The issue arises from what Director of Student Life Kenyon Bonner called a “gray area” in the Student Government Board’s rules manual about international travel. Bonner said that the rule about international travel stems from the frequently high cost of flights from outside the continental United States.

Bonner said that decision-making concerning that gray area falls on the Board itself. That decision is related to a large body of unwritten rules separate from the Allocations Manual and referred to as precedents that the Board uses to govern its actions. Some of these rules include limits on conference funding amounts and tournament funding for club A teams but not B teams.

Landreneau said that, as far as he knows, no group has received funding for international travel by including it in a visitor’s fee while he has been on the Board, but he also said that it would be difficult to tell if such an allowance was made without SGB’s knowledge. He said that while groups may have speakers or performers come from outside the country, their fees can only pay for the value of the time they spend performing or speaking.

Board member Julie Hallinan said that there is a certain level of support Board members should provide to groups for Allocations requests. She also said that since Genus was on the Allocations Committee before becoming a Board member, it made sense that he was helping the group with its request.

“But there’s a certain line you need to know if what you’re doing is right or wrong,” Hallinan said.

She said that when the Board gets funding requests for honorariums, it is possible that money for international flights are hidden in those costs and it “slips through the cracks.”

“But this was such an obvious thing that they put in the honorarium,” she said.