The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) government in Lagos state has announced a 725% increment in fees payable by students of Lagos State University (LASU). The highest fee proposed for medical students is N348, 750 – several times higher than the minimum wage!
Coming on the heels of harsh anti-poor attacks (planned removal of oil subsidy and electricity tariff hike) by the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) Federal government, this latest fee increment is beginning to show clearly the consensus of all political parties including the ACN on attacks on the living conditions of young people, students and workers.
The Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) has always argued that there is no fundamental difference between the ACN and the PDP. They both defend the same neo-liberal and anti-poor policies of removal of fuel subsidy, deregulation, fuel price hike, education commercialization and privatization of public assets. Only the building of a mass-based and democratic working class political party can provide the vast majority of working masses and angry youths with a political way out of the crisis of capitalism in Nigeria. With public ownership of key sectors of the economy linked with a socialist plan, Nigeria’s resources are more than enough to provide free and functional education at all levels.
As anger boils among young people and students, most of whom would be forced out of school as a result of fee hike, there is the urgent necessity to begin to build a mass-based struggle that can defeat education attacks and that can link demands for free education with the necessity for socialist change. The takeover of the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) by pro-capitalist government agents has been a key obstacle, in the last 10 years, to students struggle against education attacks. There is the urgent need to rebuild the Students’ Unions and make them real democratic and fighting organs of students through which a new mass-based and fighting national students’ platform can emerge.
The DSM calls on students of LASU to resist this fee hike with boycott, protest and demonstration. We urge staff unions and the trade unions to give support and solidarity to the struggle. Young people and students must resist the glaring insincerity of a ruling class which bails out banks while imposing ever higher school fees on students and taxes on poor people. Even though the fee hike is planned to kick off next session, the plans and activities to resist it must begin right from now. Below is a leaflet issued by the Education Rights Campaign (ERC) to sensitize the students’ populace and other members of the university community on the need to struggle against the outrageous fee increment.