‘You Cannot Blackmail Us’, LASG Tells LASU Students

SAYS COMMITTEE WILL DETERMINE REVIEW

Lagos State Government, Thursday insisted that the procedure aimed at solving the crisis in the State’s University (LASU) has reached an advanced stage saying the three-year-old fee regime would be reviewed based on the outcome of the committee set up by the State Executive Council to handle the issue.

Receiving protesting LASU students who had thronged the Lagos House, Ikeja, demanding an “immediate” reduction in the fees introduced in 2011, Government explained that it would act after the ad-hoc committee has submitted its report to Council on Monday June 9, 2014.

Noting that the current attempt to blackmail or stampede it will not fly, the government wondered why the students would be demanding immediate review of the fee regime introduced as part of the many recommendations of a Visitation Panel set up on the demand of the students who had gone to the House of Assembly on a save-our-soul mission to rescue their school from the Status of a “glorified secondary school”.

This was premised on the fact that the Governor of the State had met the students twice and personally requested their proposal on what they considered reasonable fees which the government immediately started considering.
Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr. Lateef Ibirogba, and his Ministry of Transportation counterpart Mr. Kayode Opeifa, who received the students, wondered why the issue of the school fee regime is now being orchestrated when even the first set of students that paid it are now in their 300 level.

They advised the students not to be used by mischief makers who may want to politicize the issue for their selfish ends especially now that the school has now come out of the many troubles it faced when the fee was first introduced.
According to the Commissioners, “The school has now surmounted the many troubles it faced in 2012 based on the focus and the creative approach used to solve the academic, social and Environmental issues that bedeviled the school at that time”.

As they said, the creativity adopted in exempting old students from the fee, the increase in scholarship budget from N700 million to N1.2 billion, the increase in bursary, the on-going infrastructural development projects in the school and the deliberate stemming of the consistent flouting of the NUC admission regulations, have all added to the reaccreditation of almost all the courses in the school.