Professor Florence Obi, the Vice-Chancellor of the esteemed University of Calabar, UniCal, has expressed a compelling viewpoint on the financial autonomy of Nigerian universities. She asserts that their autonomy is contingent on the ability to collect tuition fees from students, a practice currently disallowed.
During a significant interaction with journalists to commemorate her third year in office as the first female VC of UniCal, she emphasized that the government continues to bear the burden of paying university workers’ salaries, as well as providing capital grants for development. Moreover, universities receive support from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for essential facilities.
However, the pivotal question remains – without adequate funding from tuition fees and the government, how can Nigerian universities generate Internally Generated Revenue (IGR)? Prof. Obi elucidates that the institutions have resorted to levying students for services such as examinations, medical care, and ICT, with these funds collectively sustaining their operations.
Emphatically, she highlights the underlying challenge, “We don’t get money to run the universities from government, what government gives is overhead and for a second generation university like UniCal, we get N12 million monthly, for 2023 we have only gotten it for seven months.”
Adding further perspective, Prof. Obi underscores the impracticality of remitting 40 per cent of IGR to the government, stating that such a move would be detrimental to the functioning of the universities. She utilizes a practical example, illustrating how charging N2,000 for identity cards, with 40 per cent remitted, would impede the provision of these essential cards.
Evidently, the proposed policy of remitting 40 per cent of IGR to the government could have been perilous for the future of public universities in Nigeria. Prof. Obi commends the decision to discard this policy, emphasizing the need for universities to receive proper funding to operate effectively.
It is noteworthy that the Federal Government had earlier unveiled an autonomy policy that required universities to remit 40 per cent of their IGR to the government, a policy that was eventually retracted.
This insight from Prof. Florence Obi sheds light on the intricate financial dynamics of Nigerian universities, igniting a crucial conversation about the sustainable funding of higher education institutions in the country.
Sourced: News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)
