For a Movement to Fight for
Scrapping of Fees, Improved Funding and Free Education
On
the occasion of the 2015 International Students Day, the Education Rights
Campaign (ERC) decries successive governments’ neo-liberal market capitalist policies that
have converted education into business and students into customers. This is
reflected in the astronomical fee hike, far above the national minimum wage of
N18, 000, which students in public tertiary institutions across the country are
being subjected to. The consequence is exclusion of tens of thousands of
students and an increasing drop-out rate.
The
latest fee hike has just occurred at the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa Univeristy
(ATBU) Bauchi where fresh students will now pay N44,
250 while returning students would pay N39, 520, up from N22, 500 and N14, 500
respectively.
We
reject the unfair education system which uses high fees to force students from
poor working class background to abandon their dreams of getting a University
degree and pushes them into a life of crime. With this unfair education policy,
the capitalist ruling elite aim to sustain the class divide between the rich
and the poor by ensuring young people from working class and poor backgrounds
are never able to rise above the poverty in which they are subjected. We also reject
the effort by government, through the policy of underfunding, to kill public
universities in order to promote private universities which are owned by
corrupt politicians, churches and other private interests.
We
affirm that education is a right, not a privilege. We say education should not
be for the rich alone, neither should it be a “debt sentence”. When an
individual is educated, the entire society reaps the benefit. We declare that
public education is a social responsibility of government to its citizens and
demand scrapping of all fees and the immediate increase in the funding of
education with a view to making education free at all levels. Currently funding
to education remains abysmally low.
As a result of
government pro-capitalist policy, funding of essential facilities in tertiary
institutions are being cut. Grants given to faculties and departments are never
enough to cover their most basic overhead costs. Essential facilities like
hostels, water, electricity supply and medical clinics are rarely allocated
enough funds. As the Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public
Universities reported in November, 2012, physical facilities for teaching and
learning in Nigerian Universities are inadequate, dilapidated,
over-stretched/overcrowded and improvised. Open-air sports pavilions, old
cafeteria, convocation arenas and even uncompleted buildings are being used for
lectures. In some cases, workshops are conducted under corrugated sheds or
trees.
Many laboratories and
workshops are old with inappropriate facilities. Equipments and consumables are
absent, inadequate or outdated. In fact, many laboratory equipments are only
known to students in theory. They have never seen them not to talk of using
them. Kerosene stoves are being sued as Bunsen burners in some laboratories. In
many Universities, science-based faculties are running “Dry Lab” for lack of
reagent and tools to conduct physical and real experiments. When major
equipments exist, the ratio to student, in some universities, is as high as
1:500. Library resources are outdated. Nigerian universities have a crisis of
man power. Majority of Universities in the country are grossly understaffed,
rely heavily on part-time and visiting lecturers, have under-qualified
academics and have no effective staff development programme outside of TETFUND
intervention. As a result, the students lecturer ratio in Universities are
alarming (e.g. NOUN: 1:363, UNIABUJA: 1:122, LASU: 1:114 etc).
Public polytechnics and
colleges of education are worse off. The condition at colleges of education
across the country is so bad that there is little wonder that one of the
obstacles to achieving the Education For All (EFA) goals was the shortage of teachers and low teaching quality.
Despite strikes and protests in recent years, government and employers of
labour continue to pursue a brutal policy of discrimination against HND
certificate holders thus condemning many polytechnic graduates to low paid
employment.
Recent protest of
students at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) over bed-bug infested mattresses
has again brought to light the terrible living conditions students are
subjected to. The provision of decent hostel accommodation to at least 50% of
the student population in any residential university is proving to be an uphill
task for Nigerian universities. Overall provision of student housing is less
than 30% of the demand. Vast majority live in privately-rented accommodation.
Most state universities have no provision at all for student accommodation.
Whilst there are around
1, 252, 913 (2013 estimate) students in 61 public universities in Nigeria, only
about 109, 509 (10.3% of the total student population) on-campus hostel bed
spaces are available. The resulting situation is overcrowding as many students
who do not get official accommodation resort to squatting. The hostels are
infested with rodents and bed bugs. Lavatories and bathrooms in most hostels
are both inadequate and unfit for human use. This is not surprising given the
average ratio of toilet to users of 1:20. As a result, many students, including
female students, are forced to take their bath in the open and use the bush for
defecation. The terrible living condition takes heavy toll on students’ health.
This has led to a prevalence of pneumonia and Bronchitis as a result of indoor
cooking, cholera, Diarrhea, typhoid fever, toilet infection and hepatitis due
to unclean water and poor sanitary conditions in the hostels.
In fact, so terrible are
the conditions of study in Nigeria that students are dying in droves across the
country. Many health centres are so understaffed that while a doctor or nurse
is attending to a patient, over 30 others are waiting on the queue. This has
led to at least five deaths this year alone. Examples are Mayowa Alaran at the
University of Ibadan, Kel at the University of PortHarcourt, Oluchi Anekwe at
the University of Lagos, Akintaro Raphael at the Polytechnic Ibadan and Maria
Atere at the Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta. They were all
neglected at their institution’s health centres and died in the process. The ERC demands that education should not be a death
sentence. However without fighting for improved
funding of education and democratic running of schools, many more would find
themselves falling victim of the tragic conditions in the education system.
Unless something is
hurriedly done, the condition of public education look set to get worse in the
next period. The situation in Osun, Oyo and Ekiti states where primary and
secondary education have come under new threats are indications of what to
expect. Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai’s brazen call for the sale of
Unity schools betrays the mindset of the so-called “progressives” now in power.
Given half a chance, they could completely convert public education into
something the children of the poor cannot have a chance at having. Their excuse
would be the on-going economic crisis and the need for reforms.
The Education Rights
Campaign (ERC) warns the Buhari government not to try to use the economic
crisis and revenue decline as an excuse to implement austerity policies dressed
up as cost-saving measures. During his first coming as a military ruler in
1984, Buhari stopped the public-funded cafeteria system which ensured
subsidized meal for university students. Any attempt to impose austerity
measures on public education will be met with nationwide mass boycott,
demonstrations and resistance.
A central lesson that
all students in Nigeria must take from the recent victorious #FeesMustfall struggle
in South Africa is that even during an economic crisis, we can force government
to retreat on its neo-liberal attacks on education and win big concessions on
fees, funding, living and learning conditions. Both Nigeria and
South Africa are in the throes of
economic crisis caused by the decline in commodity prices and slowing global
growth especially in China. In Nigeria, politicians of both the PDP and APC
squandered the huge revenue generated over the past years from high price of
crude oil such that by the time price fell, there were only a little savings
left to cushion the effect.
Therefore, Nigerian students
must not give in to the blackmail that we cannot get improvement in funding to
education now because of the economic crisis. To their blackmails, we have to demand
that rather than cut education funding, it is the salaries, allowances and
privileges of public office holders that should be cut. Austerity is not the
answer to economic crisis. Rather than resolve the crisis, austerity merely
places the burden on workers, youth and the poor who did not benefit from the
boom. Whereas if the key sectors of the economy were placed under public
ownership and workers’ democratic control and management, there would be no
need for cuts, instead it would be possible to ensure that much of Nigeria’s
wealth that often goes to enrich the 1 per cent is recovered and invested,
through a socialist plan, to meet the needs of the mass majority. We should not
accept to wait until the economy improves until we demand that fees in Nigeria
must fall as well. We have waited too long already such that at the basic
education level, over 10.5 million children of school-going age are out of
school. We have waited long enough that 6 million out of the 36 million girls
out of school globally are Nigerians. How much longer would we have to wait?
To be clear, the
confidence and bravery to fight is not what is missing. Despite brutal
victimizations, Nigerian students have led big mass struggles in the past one
of which is the successful struggle last year at the Lagos state University
(LASU) which forced a total reversal of hiked fees and payment of refunds to
those who had paid the fees for three years. A key obstacle in the student movement is the rightwing and
pro-government leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students
(NANS) which prefers to run after one capitalist politician or the other for
money rather than provide leadership to the mass of their members. Obviously
something has to be done about this. The ERC calls for a campaign to reclaim
NANS and for these self-appointed state agents masquerading as students’
leaders to be flushed out and the students’ movement reclaimed and rebuilt from
the bottom to the top. However alongside the campaign to reclaim NANS, the
struggle against fees and poor conditions in the education sector must begin in
earnest. Activists must now devote themselves to intervening among the rank and
file students, education workers and the labour movement with the aim of
building a united movement from below that can begin to mobilize for struggle
against fees and for overall improvement in the funding and conditions of
education.
Hassan
Taiwo Soweto Michael Ogundele
National Coordinator (07033697259) National
Secretary
No comments:
Post a Comment