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The National Council for Tertiary Education is insisting that the leadership of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) agreed to the implementation of the utility cost sharing policy. The Executive Secretary of the Council, Professor Mahama Duwiejua on the Citi Breakfast Show said although the NUGS President raised some concerns, he agreed with the decision. “The NUGS President keeps saying that he never agreed; yes, they did express their concerns at the meeting but at the end of the day, we had a consensus and all agreed that this was the way forward,” he recalled. NUGS has warned that it will resist any attempt by government to introduce the new policy which will make it mandatory for all tertiary students to pay utility bills. The Education Ministry which is pushing the agenda says government has over the years been saddled with debt to utility providers which in some instances led to the cutting of services to some tertiary institutions. The National President of NUGS, Prosper Dzitse told Citi News, the entire student body in Ghana will mount a strong protest to resist the policy should government go ahead with its implementation. He claimed that during a consultative meeting between all stakeholders including student leaders, NUGS made it categorically clear that the policy will financially burden students therefore his outfit would to resist any attempt by any authority or by government to enforce it. “Students of this country are already suffering and bearing so much cost and they are therefore not ready to take care of any of those costs they are talking about,” he remarked. “At the end of the day, we do not want to see anything on the bill of students as utilities,” he warned. 

Dzitse pointed out that since the stakeholder meeting on March 25, no official document has been released “for us to go through to make the necessary consultation as agreed on.” But Prof Duwiejua argued that at the stakeholder meeting, the student leaders agreed to the decision to allow students to pay their utility bills. However, there was an agreement that utility bills for school administrations, lecture halls, libraries and laboratories must not be passed on to the students and as a result, “students are to pay for what they only consume in their rooms and this was a fine agreement.” Prof Duwiejua appealed to Ghanaian tertiary students to allow the policy to be implemented “for their own future and the future of tertiary education in Ghana. We have got a reputation in the sub-region…and our certificates are respected wherever we go – these kinds of issues will do quite a lot of damage.” He revealed that the idea of cost sharing of utility bills was accepted in 1997 “but now is the implementation stage and there are difficulties which is what they should concern themselves with.” The cost sharing will include all tertiary institutions and teacher training institutions and once the principle is accepted, the management of the various institutions will have to figure out mechanisms to implement it.