RE-OPEN THE
UNIVERSITY NOW
We Support
Students’ Demand for Reversal of Hiked Fees
Press Statement
The Education Rights Campaign (ERC) condemns the
Authorities of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife for closing the
University after students in their large numbers peacefully protested the
recent astronomical increment of fees for both new and returning students.
We demand the immediate re-opening of the University
and reversal of the hiked fees. We also call on the University Management not
to victimize students for taking part in the peaceful protests.
This unfortunate closure was announced by the
University Senate on Wednesday 18 June 2014.In accordance with a sinister
agenda of the University authorities, this closure may be followed by the
victimisation of student leaders and possibly an attack on the recently
reinstated Students Union itself.
We believe this is one closure too many. The closure
was uncalled for, despotic and vindictive. The students were peaceful and
orderly and there is no evidence that a single University property was damaged
during the protest.
We consider the haste at which the University Senate
closed the university on the request of the Vice Chancellor as an abuse of the
Senate’s powers and a sinister agenda to punish students for daring to protest
Management anti-poor policies. Otherwise a reasonable University management
would find all possible means to negotiate with students with a view to meeting
their legitimate demands.
It is only in an undemocratic academic setting that
the position of the Vice Chancellor or a seat in the University Senate confirms
supreme powers on a small number of people to close the campus at will and
thereby elongate the academic career of students unnecessarily. According to
reports, the Vice Chancellor got the Senate to approve closure by selling a lie
that students were violent. In the Vice Chancellor’s wild reckoning, the fact
that students had employed the use of a gas cooker to prepare puffpuff which
all protesters peacefully occupying the Senate on Wednesday 18 June 2014 ate immediately
constituted “acts of violence”.
Only a completely despotic Vice Chancellor could
conjure up this kind of bizarre allegation against his students. OAU students
are reputed for their non-violent struggle even in the face of extreme
provocations. An individual like Prof. Bamitale Omole is no doubt a threat to
the University community which is built on the principles of academic freedom and
everywhere he holds a responsible office.
However, this essentially is why the ERC very often
argues for the involvement of elected representatives of workers and
particularly in this case, students, in the Senate and other decision-making
organs of the University. If students’ elected representatives were sitting in
the Senate, they would have been able to refute the Vice Chancellor’s cocktail
of white lies.
The students’ grouse is the astronomical hike in
payable fees by the University management. According to new regime of fees
announced by the University Management, fees payable by new students in the
Arts/Law/Social Sciences category shot up by 322%; Clinical Sciences and
Pharmacy by 267% and the Sciences 253%. For the returning students, fees were
increased by over 200% to between N19,700 to above N33,700.
The ERC considers this fee hike as unacceptable and
anti-poor. We stoutly believe that the fee hike is unnecessary especially
coming on the heels of a N200billion intervention fund won by the Academic
Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) during the six-month long strike last year
which is to be devoted to the upgrade of facilities in all public Universities.
If there is any legitimate financial need, we expect the University management
to utilize its share of the N200 billion intervention fund.
However what is at stake in the fee hike imbroglio in
OAU is the question: whose responsibility is it to fund public education? In
the reckoning of the OAU Vice Chancellor who is incidentally a beneficiary of
free and subsidized public education, poor working class parents who are hardly
able to afford three-square meals for their families should be straddled with
the additional financial responsibility of funding public education. The ERC disagrees
and it is clear that thousands of OAU students also disagree.
Nigeria is endowed with enormous human, material and
natural resources to fund and provide free and quality education at all levels.
It is the responsibility of government at all levels to mobilise these enormous
resources and judiciously utilize them to fund education and other public
social services and ensure a humane living standards for the populace and a
future for the Nation’s youth.
However due to the highly exploitative system of
capitalism which is in place in Nigeria and by extension the rapacious greed
and looting of the treasury by the corrupt ruling elite, Nigeria’s enormous
human and natural resources has failed to transform the lives of the mass
majority of the people. Public education, health and other social services are
the direct victims of this capitalist mismanagement of the Nation’s enormous
potentials. It is also the reason why a majority wallow of Nigerians in poverty
and hundreds of thousands of the nation’s youth are without jobs despite the
ocean of wealth in which the Nation swims.
The only solution to this distasteful state of affairs
is for a mass mobilisation of the people to overthrow the corrupt capitalist
ruling elite, end the exploitative system of capitalism and put in its place a
democratic socialist system only under which Nigeria’s enormous resources can
be democratically utilized for the needs of all.
The ERC shall continue to support the struggles of OAU
students, and by extension students of other campuses, to fight obnoxious fee
hikes and other exploitative and anti-poor policies of education
commercialisation.
Hassan
Taiwo Soweto Ogundele
Michael
National
Coordinator National
Secretary
07033697259 07066249160
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