Besides loss of months in their academic calendar arising from the strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), students and their parents are losing money as they are paying rent for vacant private hostels.
In the past three months, ASUU strike has forced students in public universities out of their campuses, with many of them being idle at home.
The increase in students’ population and annual enrolment rate, estimated at 12 percent in public universities, has made available hostel facilities in those universities grossly inadequate. BusinessDay findings show that about 70 percent of the students’ population seek alternative accommodation outside campus hostels.
This means that the on-campus hostels are able to provide accommodation for only 30 percent of university students.
Frequent and prolonged strikes by university teachers over the years have made students lose millions of money paid to landlords of private hostels.
Ifeanyichukwu Obidike is one of such students. A 300-level student of the Department of Estate Management in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Ifeanyi was forced to go home to be with his parents in April 2020 following the ASUU strike action in March of that year.
From a two-week warning, ASUU strike morphed into nine months that was made worse by COVID-19 sit-at-home order, lockdown and social distancing rules that were imposed in 2020.
That strike ended in January 2021. Barely two years later, Ifeanyi is back home following ASUU’s one-month warning strike declared on February 14, 2022 but has now degenerated into three months and still counting.
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Ifeanyi is not happy travelling this same road once again. “I am sad, unhappy and worried about everything including the rent I have paid for the accommodation I am not using. Again, my properties are in the hostel and I cannot guarantee their safety as robbers occasionally break into these hostels and loot properties,” he lamented.
Awka, which is the capital of Anambra State, is quite expensive. Rent, especially for houses that are close to the university, is high and so, Ifeanyi pays as much as N100,000 per year for a three-bed hostel accommodation and the landlord does not care whether school is in session or not.
It follows that between February 2020 and January 2021, Ifeanyi lost over N60,000 he paid as rent but never used because he was at home from April 2020 and resumed school in January 2021. This rent was renewed just the next month.
For his four-year programme, Ifeanyi is supposed to pay N400,000 as rent but is now at a loss how much he would have paid at the end because he is not sure when the programme would end, given the current strike by the lecturers.
Ifeanyi was just 13 years old when his father died from a domestic accident and has been at the mercy of his mother, a petty trader at Orie Oba market in Nsukka area of Enugu State. His elder brother, a Microbiology graduate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is yet to get a reasonable job.
His mother’s pain is just as deep as that of Grace Okonjo, whose first daughter, Euphemia Adaora, gained admission in January this year and went to school from her elder sister’s house in Delta State until she was able to pay her accommodation fees for a hostel off-campus. She paid 75,000 in early February.
“Just as Ada was about to move into the newly rented hostel, ASUU declared a one-month warning strike. Now, we have lost almost N20,000 on the rent as she has not spent a single day in the hostel. She is likely to lose more because nobody knows when this strike will end,” she told BusinessDay.
Continuing, she said, “I spoke to the caretaker to whom I paid the rent to inquire if something could be done about this so as to reduce the burden of renewing the rent as my daughter has not spent a day in the hostel. But he said there was nothing he could do.”
Okonjo stressed that she was also worried with the economic situation of the country as there was no money or job in Nigeria, yet the little money that is available to take care of the children was being wasted on things like rent paid for unoccupied hostels.
“Please help us, the parents of Nigerian undergraduates. It is not fair that our children spend more years in school than they ought to and we have to spend more on their accommodation than we are supposed to,” she appealed to ASUU and the government.
It is estimated that in the last 21 years, ASUU has spent no less than 1,500 days on strike. While students were trying to get over the disastrous effect of the 2020 ASUU strike, which lasted nine months and universities were beginning to get back to running their normal academic calendar pre-2020, the union embarked on a warning strike that has snowballed into an indefinite strike.
Parents and other interested parties have appealed to both ASUU and the federal government to sink their differences in the interest of the students who have had their programmes extended, leaving their parents at a loss as to what becomes of them in the months and years ahead.
