Students Shut Down UNIPORT Over Hike in Fees

Students of the University of Port Harcourt kicked off a protest around 5 a.m. this morning over the hike in their fees and other levies.

The aggrieved students whose first semester examinations was scheduled to start by 9 a.m this morning reportedly blocked all entry and exit points in the institution to press home their demands.

A student who preferred to be anonymous told DailyPost,

We pay the highest amount of school fees in Nigeria. Among all the Federal Universities in this country, UNIPORT pays highest. They will still ask us to pay faculty dues, departmental dues, exam registration fees and many others.

We are sick and tired of all these payments. They even went ahead to issue a deadline for these payments not considering that things are hard for our parents.

We decided to embark on this protest today because 1st semester exams are supposed to start today and what we have done is to stop it from holding.

According to TheNews, a Deputy Registrar and spokesman of the institution, Dr. Williams Wodi, has however said,

What’s going on is that less than 2 percent of our students are protesting and are refusing to allow workers and other students to come into the campus to start their Exams or do their legitimate duties.

We sensitized our students as far back as November 2015, that we are going to change the perception of University where students come school free and carry over all school fees from year one to the final year and they should pay what we gave as outstanding charges because we do charge school fees.

We told them that all returning students are to pay N45,000. That has been communicated through the school website, circular and the school bulletins and others. When we wanted to enforce the payment at the beginning of the session we saw that the compliance was very low.  The first deadline was 21 February 2016.

We extended it to March 11,2016. We made it lecture free for all students to pay. We recorded some mileages. Then we extended it to March 30,2016. We still had some students who have not paid. So we opened our portal on April 5 and for them to pay,  we still had problems with a couple of them and reopened it on April 6 and closed it on midnight of April 7.

You can see that from November last year to February 12,March 11,March 30,April 5 and finally April 7,  98 percent of students complied.

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About 2 percent of the students have not complied and they are the ones making heaven and earth meet…All those who are yet to pay by midnight of April 7, 2016 will automatically carry over the semester…

Over the years parents and students have had the notion that students can pass through the institution without paying and after  graduation they would pay.The decision of the institution is a recent development.”

See photos from the protest below.