The University of Benin (UNIBEN) unveiled an increase in students’ fees, timing the announcement to a period when the students are on holiday in order to avert likely protests and resistance.
The current increase in fees marks the second time in consecutive academic seasons that UNIBEN would demand higher fees as part of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). A student union leader at the university told SaharaReporters that the management had resorted to hiking NHIS fees because it had exhausted excuses for increasing fees under such names as teaching fees, examination fees and hostel fees. “All these fees are ways of adding undue financial burden on students and their parents,” the source told SaharaReporters.
Students had stoutly resisted the university’s previous hike in fees, which proposed to raise fees from N9,800 and N7,800 fees to N24,000 and N22,000 respectively. In the end, the management and the students reached a compromise of N14,000 and N12,000 respectively. Two student union leaders told SaharaReporters that the university had also used the NHIS to justify the last increase. Under the fee hike, each student would pay an additional N400 for the NHIS.
“Why are they using it again to ask students to pay more?” one student asked, promising that the student body would resist the latest increase when classes resume.
During the previous increase, UNIBEN’s Vice Chancellor, Osauiki Oshondi, pleaded with the students to accept the increase in NHIS fees in order to help the institution to bridge a revenue shortfall that arose from the cancellation of the university’s revenue-earning part-time programs.
“The N400 per student is a rip-off that will be resisted upon our students’ resumption,” said a student leader, adding, “N400 each from 40,000 students is a lot of money.”
Another student stated that the UNIBEN administration claimed that the new increase was a directive from the NHIS to all federal academic institutions. “But we doubt it. That’s why they announced the increase during our vacation period,” he said, vowing student resistance.