Fees hike: FG setting university administrators against students —Prof Odukoya, ASUU coordinator

<p>Professor Adelaja Odukoya is the Dean of Faculty of Social Science at the University of Lagos, Akoka. He is also the Lagos zone coordinator of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). He speaks in this interview by TUNBOSUN OGUNDARE on a range of issues, including the alleged move by the Federal Government to commercialise public universities.</p>, <p>You have been in the public university system for over two decades, how would you explain the financial conditions of most students?</p>, <p>Students mostly do not have independent sources of finance. They are naturally dependent. With over 70 percent of Nigerians experiencing multi-dimensional poverty, it is safe to say most students in public universities are from poor homes and the last eight years have seen to the worsening of the poverty of their parents. It is against this background that the recent hike in school fees, despite the bogus free-tuition deception, is unconscionable, wicked, insensitive and inhuman.</p>, <p>But let’s put the blame where it is, at the doorsteps of the government that has, in the most irresponsible manner, distanced itself from funding education. Now the government is indirectly setting the administrators of our tertiary institutions against their students.</p>, <p>With the cost of everything hitting the skies and the government refusing to fund these institutions, the government is now asking the universities to feast on their students whose parents are suffering the effects of the government’s planlessness and uncritical embrace of the ruinous neo-liberal poisonous policies of the IMF and the World Bank</p>, <p>Are you saying the children of the rich, including political leaders, are no longer attending Nigeria’s public universities?</p>, <p>That is exactly how it is. The rich and the political leaders don’t send their children to public schools again in Nigeria like in the olden days. Not only do they no longer sending their kids to public universities, they also don’t send them to public primary and secondary schools.