From the President Elect Desk Comr Nurudeen
Temilola Yusuf:
ON LASU FEES, AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR FASHOLA
The LASU fee hike is the greatest challenge we
have been faced with in the last decade. Calling for
superior arguments and proposal for the reduction
is a testament to the fact that the government of
Lagos State is not inflexible to change.
Following the seemingly endless crisis in LASU, in 2011 the Lagos State House of Assembly passed a
resolution, consequently, His Excellency set-up a visitation panel to look into all the issues that
nearly tore LASU apart. In the report of the visitation panel, recommendations were made to
the Government on way forward in the University.
Unfortunately, government was selective on those
that favour her alone. A classical example of this is
in Section 4.0, Term of Reference (iii), particularly at Section 4.0.2 paragraph (g) where the panel recommended the “increase in the budgetary
allocation to the university using the UNESCO benchmark of a minimum of 25% of annual budget of the state to be expounded on education”.
Considering the class and social status of all
members of the panel, these are people who can
afford multiples of these ‘OUTRAGEOUS FEES’. Not
even one of them belongs to the middle class as
they have their ward schooled or schooling in the world top private universities such as Harvard.
Meanwhile, LASU is meant for Lagosians, and a
larger part of whom belongs to the middle class.
In the law that provides for the establishment of
LASU, Section 3 provides for the objectives of the
university shall be to: (f) “To provide ready access
for citizens of the state in particular to higher education regardless of social origin on income”. It
therefore suffices to say that the law in extant
words provides that LASU is meant for the people
without prejudice to social status or economic
income.
Moreso, thirty (30) years ago the Lagos State
Government under Chief Lateef Jankande
established LASU. The party in government then
was the Unity Party Nigeria (UPN). This was a
party whose linear ideological ancestor was Action
Group led by late Obafemi Awolowo. By the time of
the Second Republic, the idea of the free education
was no longer restricted to primary education, but
also to secondary and tertiary education.
At presently, we are in the Fourth Republic and
indeed 21st century. With the population of Lagos
State, we have above six (6) million prospective
transiting students. Even when the tertiary
institutions cannot accommodate more than N100,
000, LASU is priced out of the reach of the people.
LASU is for the people; therefore, it must be affordable. This is a state where the per capital
income of an average Lagosian is around $100
month (approximately 16,700). How do we expect
the wards of these people to access tertiary
education, when in the reality, a degree is not
almost enough to earn good livelihood.
Your Excellency Sir, I will want to quickly digress a
little to consider all that were summed up in the fee
before we arrived at N193,750, 223,750, 248, 750
and 348,750 for Arts/Education, Social and
Management sciences, Law and College of Medicine
respectively. Some of these fees going by the
breakdown cannot be justified. For instance in
Faculty of Education, Teaching Practice is N15,000.
For the purpose of clarification, teaching practice is
a service rendered by our students to public
secondary schools in Lagos. Like Housemanship
for Medical Students, we are meant to be paid for
rendering these services and not pay for rendering
it.
Assuming but not conceding to the fact that quality
education is determined by how much you can
afford, as it was argued by His Excellency, “that a
lawyer trained with N25,000 cannot compete
globally compared to his counterpart in the UK
trained with 9,000 pounds”. We make bold to aver
that there is no correlation co-efficient at all
between price and quality education. A case in
point is not far from us. Your Excellency, you are a
Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), the highest rank
that can be conferred on a lawyer and you had your
University education at University of Benin, Nigeria
at a little or no amount. Only a few lawyers are
conferred with (SAN) whether or not they are
trained in Harvard, Oxford or Jupiter if not on this
planet earth.
Let us at this point bring to your notice that
University of Helsinki, Finland is the 1st in Finland
and 76th in the world and it is tuition free. Maybe
Lagos state government will want to say that they
are subsidising the education of each student in
LASU with N 700,000 we are yet to see any
concrete evidence to that effect. This is premised
on the fact that if a private university can charge N
450,000 to include feeding and accommodation for
a year, then LASU is costly compare to private
schools for paying N350, 000 without
accommodation and feeding.
However, we must bear at the back of our mind that
LASU is not a private university. It is a public utility
that is meant to serve the people and not for profit
making. Therefore, the fee hike is unjust for
reasons that LASU was created as an environment
to level the social class in the society for the poor,
rich and middle class. Harvard is a private school
let us stop comparing LASU to Harvard.
To be continued
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