VC Accuses FG Over Schools Funding

The Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Prof. Bartho Okolo, has said that the Federal Government does not fund primary and secondary schools owned by its universities.

Addressing a news conference on the institution’s 50th anniversary in Enugu last Monday, Okolo said workers in such schools should not regard themselves as federal workers.

On the recent monetisation arrears paid to some federal workers, he explained that the teachers were not part of the package.

According to him this is because both the primary and secondary schools belong to the university and not to the Federal Government.

He said that the schools were for the university’s staff children but had to be thrown open to the  immediate community as part of its community service.

The vice chancellor said the university could not pay the monetisation package to the employees of the schools because it lacked the financial capacity to do so.

He said that pupils paid only N6,000 per student as tuition in the primary schools while efforts were on to raise it.

This was to enable the school to meet the demands of competition in the globalisation of education standards, he added.

According to him, the boards of the schools were to generate budgets that would support quality education and were allowed to fix fees that would lead to competitive products.

“We  have only one education today globally, we need quality teachers, infrastructures and we must follow due process,” he said.

The Tide’s source gathered that the tuition  in the primary school has been increased fromN6,000 to N15,000 while that of the secondary segment was raised from N35,000 to N55,000.