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...
Posted on: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 17:09:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015