As a student in Ife between 2014 and 2019, my greatest fear was anything that seemed like a fee hike.
Tuition was ‘only’ N19,700, but you would understand why the word ‘only’ is relative when you realise that it was still difficult for some of us to pay. There were those who even had to take leaves of absence.
We would protest the closure of the course registration portal, which only granted access if you had paid fees. We sought extensions upon extensions to payment deadlines.
You might also realise that we were happy to be tagged restless or troublesome students rather than being named dropouts. If a student could struggle to pay N19,700 in tuition fees, what would happen if tuition was increased to N100,000 or to some of the unimaginable amounts that students pay as tuition nowadays? Your guess is as good as mine: massive dropouts.
A larger population of young people has been denied access to education because of fees, and tuition increments continue to widen the inequality gap.
So you mostly find us on the ideological left, not on the right, because economic realities determined the positions we took on issues of funding and other systemic debates. It was a fight to stay in school and ultimately, to survive. The material conditions of people shape their consciousness.
At 300 level, after already becoming popular for appearing in most scenes of student unrest, some of us had envisaged that tuition fees could reach unprecedented levels, such as N500,000 in public universities, if stakeholders in the education sector, especially students, did not successfully reject the trend of fee hikes. This was still around 2017.
At the time, it wasn’t just mere talk. State schools like EKSU, just to mention an example, were already charging students hundreds of thousands of Naira.
In OAU, we still guarded the gates against fee hikes, joining students in rejecting creeping increments, even at the College of Health Sciences, without being medical students. Not that we enjoyed the restlessness – but you could also say so, depending on how you see it – but we understood how a creeping hike at the medical college could spread to other faculties. We did not have to wait. While the management strategised, we were watchdogs, observing every one of their moves and waiting for them at every angle.
We saw that the drive to commercialise education was a plot being developed beyond our campus. We linked up with fellow students in other schools, including then TASUED, UNILAG, LAUTECH, and UI. Because NANS was no longer living up to its mandate – it is still not- we organised under the banner of the Alliance of Nigerian Students Against Neoliberal Attacks (ANSA).
There was a coordinated national campaign against fee hikes across boards, a campaign authorities responded to with school closures, rustication of students, and even arrests of some. The ever-trending video of late Governor of Ajimobi calling himself the ‘constituted authority’ was documented from one of such struggles. At that time, LAUTECH had been shut for months over issues of funding.
I lay these premises because of the recent remarks made by the immediate past Vice Chancellor of Lagos State University, Prof. Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, that universities that seek to attain self-sufficiency would charge students tuition as high as N1 million.
I did not find her statement surprising for a someone who had been in charge of the administration of a university and whose assignment was defined and direct – generate revenue!
According to her interview with PUNCH Newspapers published on September 22, the state government through the deputy chief of staff had asked her to increase the university’s dedicated revenue. Specifically, she was to move it from N3bn to N7bn. She said they were able to eventually push it to N13bn.
With a school asked by the state government to generate that much in revenue, it is not rocket science that the revenue must come from somewhere. And who would carry most of the costs, if not the students who have often been seen by their own governments as a burden? They simply say you must pay if you must go to school.
Of course, they have to pay N1m in tuition fees, or N2m or even N3m, insofar as the government grants autonomy to the schools to fund themselves, almost totally. Rather than the government adequately funding public education, the burden is being shifted to students whose parents are already taxpayers. It is gradually shifting from even the reformist cost-sharing to ‘students must pay all.’
So what baffled me was the attempt by the ex-VC’s aide to ‘clarify’ the professor’s comment in another publication dated September 24. The spokesperson struggled to explain that Prof. Olatunji-Bello’s remark was misrepresented. It was more like saying the former VC didn’t mean it like that, even when her remark was clear and unambiguous.
The ex-VC’s remark only mirrored the ideology of the present and past governments on the commercialisation of education. The idea is that students must pay or don’t go to school, even though most of the leaders in government enjoyed almost free education and maintenance packages, including feeding, during their time.
For the avoidance of doubt, the University of Ilesa already charges Law and medical students between N1m and N1.25m. It is on the university’s portal, please fact-check.
So the idea of N1m tuition fees, which is ridiculous and unimaginable, is not even new in our public universities because these are part of the ‘gains’ of this administration in the area of student loans.
That was the goal with the introduction of NELFUND. Fees have gone astronomically high since the loan scheme was launched.
So, if we cannot demand adequate funding of public education, it means tuition fees in public universities can be as high as N5m or more or more (in Fela’s voice), and we should not even be shocked. The graduates will only have a heap of debts to service in the future, even if there are no jobs.