Universities fee Hike Solves nothing

In this interview with MOTUNRAYO JOEL, a veteran in the education sector, Dr. Omotoye Olorode, tackles issues confronting the sector

Students’ protests against tuition hike are gradually becoming a norm in universities. Should students be allowed to protest?

Protests, by any group, are not about being allowed or not. Protest is the only means by which grievances are articulated, although it may take different forms depending on the issues and their antecedents. We do not have many students’ protests in the last decade because students and their organisations have been silenced. They have been deliberately divided along religious and ethnic lines and their leadership has been corrupted. In many public universities, student unions have been banned for most part of the last decade while they are completely prohibited in private universities with only religious or tribal organisations being actively encouraged.

Aside protests, how else can students make their grievances known?

Where interests of parties conflict, the means and processes of resolution are always determined by the balance of forces. There is probably nowhere in the world where a country abandons its young people as Nigeria does.

Should public institutions be allowed to increase tuitions?

The question of school fees, cost recovery and deregulation rest on the World Bank’s ideological platform of privatisation and attack on public-funded social provisioning. Under (former President Olusegun) Obasanjo’s supervision, Oby Ezekwesili tried to abandon the Unity Schools to what they called Private Partnership Initiative-a euphemism for privatisation. The way our universities are today, increase in fees will address very little, if any, of their problems. Consequently, increased fees can only drive most of our children out of the universities: this World Bank project started around 1986. Where fees fund universities, as in the case of the private ones, teachers and other workers are badly or hardly paid. They are not allowed to have unions, and only rich parents can send their wards there. Even state universities that charge heavy fees and collect intervention funds (such as Education Trust Fund, Tertiary Education Trust Fund) from the Federal Government are, uniformly, badly provisioned and workers’ pays are irregular.

Some universities have linked hike in tuition to lack of funds; how can they generate funds internally?

Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Nigerian students’ movement have been complaining about underfunding of education since 1979. We have insisted that the majority of Nigerian parents are already overburdened with the cost of education; most of them live around the poverty line while many are only marginally employed in a country of opulent public officials, billionaires, and owners of private jets. Most of the Governing Councils and their Vice Chancellors linking fees with underfunding always criminalise ASUU and the students when they ask governments to increase funding for education. Many of them are attracted by the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) strategy because nobody really inquires into how these funds are deployed. In any case, universities are not trading organisations. Where universities expropriate huge resources as in Europe and North America, it had been largely from colonial and neo-colonial pillage by European and American corporations across the world.

In the case of private universities in Nigeria, most of the resources invested come from public treasuries; most of the proprietors have, or had, direct or indirect access to the public treasuries as heads of state, ministers, legal advisers and consultants to government, bureaucrats or plain hangers-on to those near the treasuries. Private universities are, indeed, in many ways illegitimate children of public facilities and institutions. Where religious organisations own universities, most members of the congregations that fund them cannot afford their fees.

You said universities owned by religious organisations are too expensive even for members of their congregation. Should they be for the masses?

What I mean are faith based organisations. My observation arises from empirical data. FBO universities arose, with other cash-and-carry institutions, with the programmed demobilisation of public-funded universities which used to be generally more accessible and more affordable for all strata of our society. Education, at all levels, must be for all citizens who can benefit from it; to achieve that goal, it cannot be for only those who can pay. As you put it, it must be for the masses. And nobody should take seriously the tokenist propaganda by some of the universities that they are offering scholarship to bright and needy students. My experience is that the large majority of our children who pass university entrance examinations have great potential and they are needy.

Do you have alternative suggestions for funding?

My answer will be predicated on our own belief that educating a citizen is an investment in the future of society; not an entirely individual investment. Parents, in spite of their financial disabilities, are already contributing heavily to this investment. This was the logic when ASUU suggested ETF (now TETFUND) to the Federal Government in 1992. There is the model we call Public Purpose Model (PPM) of funding each student in which the federal, state and local governments take full responsibility for a student’s full tuition and part of accommodation in a proportion agreed to by the three parties (tiers of government) and enforced by law across the country. This is possible and our country has resources for it. In this model, governments build the infrastructures and pay the workers.

What alternatives should universities seek to fund themselves?

You are seeking the World Bank/Government answer? Cost recovery; Privatisation; Deregulation! They say universities should invest in business, trade, and charge appropriate fees. First, it is too late in the day for public universities to be able to ameliorate their conditions significantly through trade or internally-generated resources. Universities are not trading organisations. Secondly, since governments started drumming up this deregulation strategy 30 years ago, no university has been in a position to significantly augment its resources through it. Universities are trying to generate their own resources alright opening bookshops, campus petrol stations, guest houses, saw mills, farms, floating endowment funds and consultancy services, but not much have materialised from them. In any case, as I said earlier, the ruling class knows that these are not the types of businesses which enable sudden and fabulous primitive accumulation allowing their members to found private universities. Governments should give universities OPL or oil import licences or the large acres of land which they grab in Abuja and see what universities will do with them. And the biggest source of private wealth is the pubic treasury. And as we insisted above, the problem with what they call appropriate fees is that access will be restricted to only students who can pay. If governments want to divest themselves of the proprietorship of public universities, they should say so. If all they want to be doing is using public resources to bail out failing banks and other privatised companies, they should tell the Nigerian people.

There are many more universities above Ashby Commission recommendation. Is there proliferation of universities in our land?

There was, indeed, one more university than Ashby recommended-that was the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) which arose from the Minority Report of Dr. Sanya Onabamiro of blessed memory. But that was more than 50 years ago and demands for access to university education have increased by leaps and bounds since then. In this kind of situation, demands for access can be met either by expansion of existing facilities (physical facilities, manpower, funding) or building new universities. Clearly, the first option is the more rational one. But government policy has been not only irrational but subversive and tendentious. The proliferation enables the ruling circles to satisfy their political cronies and constituents with appointments in the mushrooming.

The Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics has been on strike for eight months. Is this not harmful to the students and the education sector?

Every struggle for a better, more humane and more credible institutions in the society and even demands for decent treatment in workplaces, have consequences for those who carry out the struggle and others. These struggles entail sacrifices, losses and pains at individual and collective levels. But blackmail, dismissals, non-payment of salaries, expulsion of students, loss of valuable time and imprisonment of union and students’ leaders have not stopped demands for change. When governments are irresponsible, the only option victims have is fight or surrender. Any society in which no group is demanding alternatives to decay and degeneracy is a dying society.

Is the ministry of education doing enough to revive the education sector?

This is not just about the ministry of education or just the education sector. It is a system crisis. The crisis in education is replicated in various other sectors. It is the product of the social and economic policy of a ruling class that decides to abandon the public sector and public purpose in the pursuit of private and primitive accumulation. That policy produces and reproduces successive governing regimes, bureaucracies and parastatals, ministers and public functionaries that enforce it and its renovations since 1978 and especially since 1984. The current ministers, including that of education, are carrying out the same demolition policies.