Why Church members can’t send kids to faith-based varsities — Olukoya

General Overseer of Mountain of Fire and Miracle (MFM), Prof Daniel Olukoya, has defended the exorbitant tuition fees charged by based-faith institutions in the country, attributing it to the high cost of maintenance and energy, especially power.

Olukoya who defended the fees after being conferred with honorary doctoral degrees in Management of the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA), said the energy tariffs are severely impacting academic activities and operations of Nigerian universities.

He maintained that energy costs were responsible for the high school fees being charged by the Universities owned by religious bodies.

Olukoya, who is the proprietor of one of the 13 Faith-based universities in Nigeria, Mountain Top University, Ogun State, said most parents of students who attend faith-based universities are finding it difficult to send their children to schools because of high school fees.

He said the high cost of running the schools is necessitated by the cost of maintaining the schools responsible for the high school fees.

Absolving the proprietors of the institutions, Olukoya said; “It is not the fault of those proprietors. I am one of them. I am always at the back of the poor because I know how difficult it was for me to get to the university. My parents didn’t have the money.

“But then the current situation states that if you cannot pay good money to the lecturers or the professors, you won’t get good teachers. And if you run a private university and you are paying less than the federal universities, you will not get good professors.

“So it is the financing and paying the salaries. And that is the situation now. Power to run a university on a generator is a lot of money. In our university, most of the money goes to diesel. It is now we are installing solar.”

Speaking on the situation in the country especially security and economic challenges, Olukoya advocated divine intervention through prayer.

His words “There is only one weapon that can kill any problem, it is prayers. No matter how strong it is, prayer can dismantle any problem. And so I keep preaching here that what we need in Nigeria is divine intervention.

“Let God intervene in what we are doing. Divine intervention is greater than your brain, what your brain can do. And from what is happening in the world, you can see that God is showing mankind that they are helpless,” he added.