•We deplore arbitrary fee hikes and sharp practices that render NELFUND’s projections useless
Recent arbitrary increases in tuition fees in our tertiary institutions, apparently due to the fact that students now have access to loans provided by the Federal Government for that purpose should be expected. We say this given our experiences with how some Nigerians make nonsense of otherwise laudable government projects and programmes.
The Bola Tinubu administration set up the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) to assist indigent students financially to at least see them through higher education and later repay the loan when they start working. The essence, according to the government, is to ensure that no one is denied higher education simply because his or her parents are poor.
Many Nigerians commended the initiative which came decades after students loan and scholarships were either few and far between, or non-existent. Even bursary awards that university students used to enjoy from their state governments have vanished into thin air.
Unfortunately, the loan scheme, barely 16 months after its take-off, seems to be running into stormy waters. The latest of these are the arbitrary increases in tuition fees by several tertiary institutions, particularly for programmes such as Medicine, Nursing, and Law that have been hiked by some institutions ranging between 20 and 522 per cent.
A report titled ‘Report on Framework to Mitigate the Impact of Increased Institutional Charges on the Fund’s Operations’, lists some of the institutions where these anomalies are recorded. These include: University of Ilesha in Ilesha, Osun State, that raised its Nursing programme fee by about 55 per cent from N825,000 to N1.276 million, while its Law programme rose from N1.276 million to N1.526 million, a 20 per cent increase.
Ekiti State University in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, increased its Medicine and Surgery fee from N797,000 to N1.132 million, representing a 42 per cent hike while Edo State University, Iyamho, Etsako West Local Government Area, Edo State, raised the same programme’s fee by N1 million, from N3.250 million to N4.250 million.
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These arbitrary fee hikes are placing significant financial burden on students as well as render the fund’s projections useless.
While we agree that some of these increases might be justified given the country’s economic situation; several others are just out of tune with reality. How, for instance, could a higher institution have raised its fee by about 500 per cent in so short a time?
It would seem that some of these institutions have seen in the students’ loans a new growth area from where they could make profit. This is unfortunate as it is scandalous. Universities should be solution centres and not hubs of problems. There are tidier ways by which they could grow their revenues, even if we admit that they are not equally endowed.
NELFUND should move swiftly to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Perhaps it might be necessary to have an arrangement whereby the tuition fees could be determined by a particular body that would comprise stakeholders like the institutions, parents’ bodies and others, for standardisation. We know the environments are not the same; so there would be some variations in the arrangement to take care of the schools’ local peculiarities. But this would be better than individual institutions fixing their fees arbitrarily.
We support the fund’s recommendations, including stopping disbursements to schools with extreme increases pending review, capping loans for affected institutions until a long-term solution is finalised, or temporarily halting loans to institutions where fee hikes exceed 100 per cent until a thorough review is conducted. We are also in support of the Federal Government’s decision to audit the universities over the TETFUND grants.
The 51 institutions that had been implicated in illegal deductions and exploitation of the scheme should be appropriately sanctioned without negative impact on the beneficiary students because they are not responsible for the infractions. Indeed, the officials involved must not be spared either. That is the only way the government can demonstrate its zero tolerance for corruption on the arrangement.
The scheme deserves the support and cooperation of all stakeholders. The schools must understand that the money is not freebie; it is loans that the beneficiaries would repay sometimes later. They therefore need to be sympathetic and considerate in all they do.
