In this interview with MOTUNRAYO JOEL, a veteran in the education sector, Dr. Omotoye Olorode, tackles issues confronting the sector
Students’ protests against tuition hike are gradually becoming a norm in universities. Should students be allowed to protest?
Protests, by any group, are not about
being allowed or not. Protest is the only means by which grievances are
articulated, although it may take different forms depending on the
issues and their antecedents. We do not have many students’ protests in
the last decade because students and their organisations have been
silenced. They have been deliberately divided along religious and ethnic
lines and their leadership has been corrupted. In many public
universities, student unions have been banned for most part of the last
decade while they are completely prohibited in private universities with
only religious or tribal organisations being actively encouraged.
Aside protests, how else can students make their grievances known?
Where interests of parties conflict, the
means and processes of resolution are always determined by the balance
of forces. There is probably nowhere in the world where a country
abandons its young people as Nigeria does.
Should public institutions be allowed to increase tuitions?
The question of school fees, cost
recovery and deregulation rest on the World Bank’s ideological platform
of privatisation and attack on public-funded social provisioning. Under
(former President Olusegun) Obasanjo’s supervision, Oby Ezekwesili tried
to abandon the Unity Schools to what they called Private Partnership
Initiative-a euphemism for privatisation. The way our universities are
today, increase in fees will address very little, if any, of their
problems. Consequently, increased fees can only drive most of our
children out of the universities: this World Bank project started around
1986. Where fees fund universities, as in the case of the private ones,
teachers and other workers are badly or hardly paid. They are not
allowed to have unions, and only rich parents can send their wards
there. Even state universities that charge heavy fees and collect
intervention funds (such as Education Trust Fund, Tertiary Education
Trust Fund) from the Federal Government are, uniformly, badly
provisioned and workers’ pays are irregular.
Some universities have linked hike in tuition to lack of funds; how can they generate funds internally?
Academic Staff Union of Universities and
the Nigerian students’ movement have been complaining about underfunding
of education since 1979. We have insisted that the majority of Nigerian
parents are already overburdened with the cost of education; most of
them live around the poverty line while many are only marginally
employed in a country of opulent public officials, billionaires, and
owners of private jets. Most of the Governing Councils and their Vice
Chancellors linking fees with underfunding always criminalise ASUU and
the students when they ask governments to increase funding for
education. Many of them are attracted by the Internally Generated
Revenue (IGR) strategy because nobody really inquires into how these
funds are deployed. In any case, universities are not trading
organisations. Where universities expropriate huge resources as in
Europe and North America, it had been largely from colonial and
neo-colonial pillage by European and American corporations across the
world.
In the case of private universities in
Nigeria, most of the resources invested come from public treasuries;
most of the proprietors have, or had, direct or indirect access to the
public treasuries as heads of state, ministers, legal advisers and
consultants to government, bureaucrats or plain hangers-on to those near
the treasuries. Private universities are, indeed, in many ways
illegitimate children of public facilities and institutions. Where
religious organisations own universities, most members of the
congregations that fund them cannot afford their fees.
You said universities owned
by religious organisations are too expensive even for members of their
congregation. Should they be for the masses?
What I mean are faith based
organisations. My observation arises from empirical data. FBO
universities arose, with other cash-and-carry institutions, with the
programmed demobilisation of public-funded universities which used to be
generally more accessible and more affordable for all strata of our
society. Education, at all levels, must be for all citizens who can
benefit from it; to achieve that goal, it cannot be for only those who
can pay. As you put it, it must be for the masses. And nobody should
take seriously the tokenist propaganda by some of the universities that
they are offering scholarship to bright and needy students. My
experience is that the large majority of our children who pass
university entrance examinations have great potential and they are
needy.
Do you have alternative suggestions for funding?
My answer will be predicated on our own
belief that educating a citizen is an investment in the future of
society; not an entirely individual investment. Parents, in spite of
their financial disabilities, are already contributing heavily to this
investment. This was the logic when ASUU suggested ETF (now TETFUND) to
the Federal Government in 1992. There is the model we call Public
Purpose Model (PPM) of funding each student in which the federal, state
and local governments take full responsibility for a student’s full
tuition and part of accommodation in a proportion agreed to by the three
parties (tiers of government) and enforced by law across the country.
This is possible and our country has resources for it. In this model,
governments build the infrastructures and pay the workers.
What alternatives should universities seek to fund themselves?
You are seeking the World Bank/Government
answer? Cost recovery; Privatisation; Deregulation! They say
universities should invest in business, trade, and charge appropriate
fees. First, it is too late in the day for public universities to be
able to ameliorate their conditions significantly through trade or
internally-generated resources. Universities are not trading
organisations. Secondly, since governments started drumming up this
deregulation strategy 30 years ago, no university has been in a position
to significantly augment its resources through it. Universities are
trying to generate their own resources alright opening bookshops, campus
petrol stations, guest houses, saw mills, farms, floating endowment
funds and consultancy services, but not much have materialised from
them. In any case, as I said earlier, the ruling class knows that these
are not the types of businesses which enable sudden and fabulous
primitive accumulation allowing their members to found private
universities. Governments should give universities OPL or oil import
licences or the large acres of land which they grab in Abuja and see
what universities will do with them. And the biggest source of private
wealth is the pubic treasury. And as we insisted above, the problem with
what they call appropriate fees is that access will be restricted to
only students who can pay. If governments want to divest themselves of
the proprietorship of public universities, they should say so. If all
they want to be doing is using public resources to bail out failing
banks and other privatised companies, they should tell the Nigerian
people.
There are many more universities above Ashby Commission recommendation. Is there proliferation of universities in our land?
There was, indeed, one more university
than Ashby recommended-that was the University of Ife (now Obafemi
Awolowo University) which arose from the Minority Report of Dr. Sanya
Onabamiro of blessed memory. But that was more than 50 years ago and
demands for access to university education have increased by leaps and
bounds since then. In this kind of situation, demands for access can be
met either by expansion of existing facilities (physical facilities,
manpower, funding) or building new universities. Clearly, the first
option is the more rational one. But government policy has been not only
irrational but subversive and tendentious. The proliferation enables
the ruling circles to satisfy their political cronies and constituents
with appointments in the mushrooming.
The Academic Staff Union of
Polytechnics has been on strike for eight months. Is this not harmful to
the students and the education sector?
Every struggle for a better, more humane
and more credible institutions in the society and even demands for
decent treatment in workplaces, have consequences for those who carry
out the struggle and others. These struggles entail sacrifices, losses
and pains at individual and collective levels. But blackmail,
dismissals, non-payment of salaries, expulsion of students, loss of
valuable time and imprisonment of union and students’ leaders have not
stopped demands for change. When governments are irresponsible, the only
option victims have is fight or surrender. Any society in which no
group is demanding alternatives to decay and degeneracy is a dying
society.
Is the ministry of education doing enough to revive the education sector?
This is not just about the ministry of
education or just the education sector. It is a system crisis. The
crisis in education is replicated in various other sectors. It is the
product of the social and economic policy of a ruling class that decides
to abandon the public sector and public purpose in the pursuit of
private and primitive accumulation. That policy produces and reproduces
successive governing regimes, bureaucracies and parastatals, ministers
and public functionaries that enforce it and its renovations since 1978
and especially since 1984. The current ministers, including that of
education, are carrying out the same demolition policies.
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