The management of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital (NAUTH) has suspended the implementation of a newly introduced ₦580,000 tuition fee for nursing students following protests by students of the institution.
Gatekeepers News reports that the hospital’s Chief Medical Director, Joseph Ugboaja, announced the decision during an appearance on The Morning Brief on Channels Television on Thursday.
The fee hike had triggered protests after students raised concerns over what they described as a 500 per cent increase in tuition from ₦90,000 to ₦580,000.
Ugboaja said the management decided to suspend the new fee after consultations with student leaders, the school management and the institution’s governing board.
“What the students complained was that they were not carried along at the final decision making for the fees. They know that there was a review, their opinion was sorted, but at the level of taking decision they said there were not carried along.
“So, I had a meeting with them, I had a session with the school management, I also had a session with the board and we have decided that the management will suspend the implementation of the new policy.
“So, we have stopped it and then the committee is now going back to them to have a session with the students and all of them will come together and agree on the way forward,” he said.
Ugboaja noted that the protest was not initiated by the student leadership but was largely driven by concerns that students were not adequately involved in the final decision on the fee review.
‘Fee Still Lowest in South-East’
Despite suspending the implementation, the NAUTH chief defended the proposed tuition, stating that the ₦580,000 fee remains the lowest among nursing training institutions in the South-East.
He explained that the fee review followed the transition from the traditional Registered Nurse/Registered Midwife (RN/RM) training programme to a National Diploma and Higher National Diploma structure approved by the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria.
“What we were running before is the RN/RM programme, that is the basic nursing programme but recently we moved to the ND programme articulated by the Nigerian Nursing and Midwifery Council. So, we are now running the ND/HND programme,” Ugboaja said.
“Now we have two sets of students, the basic nursing and basic midwifery students and then we have the ND and HND students. People that were paying the ₦90,000 are the basic nursing and midwifery students. But the ND and HND students, they have paid the fees, they don’t have issues, people that have issues are the people that have been paying the ₦90,000.
“The basic nursing and basic midwifery students have been paying the ₦90,000 since the school commenced. In fact, we have not reviewed our fees since we started the school… Now what the board did was to adjust the fees to come up with current realities. Even with the ₦580,000, our fee remains the lowest in the region.”
Funding Challenges
Ugboaja also said teaching hospitals do not benefit from intervention funds from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), a situation he said contributed to the need to review the tuition.
He added that the fee adjustment was also linked to the hospital’s plan to develop into one of the top three teaching hospitals in Nigeria by 2030.
