The Federal Polytechnic Nekede in Owerri, Imo State, has refuted rumors that it raised tuition and other costs for the school.
Michael Arimanwa, the Polytechnic’s rector, told reporters in Owerri that the college doesn’t raise tuition or impose fees on students at random.
When compared to other colleges across the nation, Arimanwa claimed that the institution’s fees were reasonable.
As opposed to schools that required it, the rector stated that purchasing textbooks from lecturers and/or the school library was not obligatory.
He said, “Management does not arbitrarily impose fees on students. Whatever we do has a justifiable reason. Even with our increase in the price of textbooks in the institution, our maximum price of N2,500 is still the cheapest in the South-East and South-South when we checked.
“Some of the institutions do not have price ceiling for their books. Lecturers can sell at any price they determine individually. So we considered the students in fixing the price of books. Moreover, we said that it is not compulsory to buy any book written by a lecturer. Agitation about the price of something you don’t have to buy is misplaced. This is my first time of seeing people angry about the lowest price regime of a commodity.”
On the issue of the West African Examination Council certificate verification fee which the students want the Management to scrap, the Rector said, “O/Level verification is a WAEC fee. WAEC recently increased their verification fee by 100 percent. It is the owner of a certificate that pays for it to be verified. This verification is paid at the point of entry ND1 or HND1. At this point, students have a choice of changing to another institution if there is any institution where they admit students without verifying their results or where the institution pays for the verification without collecting the money from students. So, with the option of alternative institutions, agitating for this reason is misplaced.”
When questioned about the issue of payment for quick response coding of certificates which the students are resisting, Arimanwa said, “Introducing Quick Response (QR) codes on certificates and other sensitive documents such as Statements of Result and Transcripts was initially a decision of Management as something desirable to prevent the faking of our results. The NYSC in early 2021 sent us the results of four fake corps members who had Statements of Result not issued by our Registry.
“That was when Management decided to include QR codes as part of our Statements of Result, Certificates and Transcripts. In the course of time, we received it as a directive from the NBTE who also received it as a directive from the Federal Government. So, the introduction of QR codes on sensitive documents moved from what we wanted to do to what we have to do.”
