The Vice Chancellor of Federal University Oye Ekiti (FUOYE), Prof. Kayode Shoremekun has lamented the non payment of school fees by students of the institution on a large scale.
Shoremekun said that out of the over 17,000 students enrolled for the 2018/2019 academic session, about 15,000 of them are yet to pay their school fees at the last check the management made, revealing that such unwholesome development has hampered the management’s desire to meet many of the needs and demands of the school for more effective and enhanced academic and administrative activities.
The VC spoke to newsmen at the weekend during an interactive session at the school premises.
He said: “It is very appalling that students these days have been failing to pay school fees for reasons we cannot fathom. By the last check, about 15,000 of our students, have not paid. This is over 90 percent of the student population because we have over 17,000 students in the university.
“What we have found out with this is that even though the demand for education in our country is high, an effective demand which caters for prompt payment of school fees as well as being able to pay for quality education is lacking in this country,” he said.
Speaking further, the VC hinted that the school management have found out that many of the students fail to pay their school fees because they spend the ones given to them by their parents or guardians, he therefore said that the management is devising a means by which parents can pay the fees directly without having to give their children or wards who have the tendency to divert such monies for other unproductive use.
On the new efforts of his administration to provide some infrastructural facilities to aide learning and support the expanding students’ population which has resulted in the completion of projects abandoned by his predecessor, Shoremekun said a new Faculty of Law complex, Faculty of Arts, Agriculture, as well as hostels, road networks and sports complex have been built by his administration.
Stressing that a lot more would have been done if students paid their school fees as and when due, he said, “our school fees is only N40,000 for each session. I believe an average Nigerian parent should be able to afford this, but we keep witnessing a situation where students don’t pay their school fees.
There are indeed genuine cases as reasons for this ugly development, but they are very few, in the ration of five percent while we have cases where students spend their fees on over unproductive things as being majorly responsible for this. We will soon devise a means by which parents would pay directly into the school’s account.”