This was stated by Obi, the institution's first female vice chancellor, during a press conference on Thursday in Calabar to commemorate her third year in office.
She noted that in addition to capital grants for development, the government continued to pay university employees' salaries.
"This is on top of the facility support provided by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
"Where would the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) come from if the universities don't receive the necessary financing from the government and the students don't pay tuition?
"In order to survive, the universities had to start charging students for services like exams, medical care, and ICT levies. The total amount of money that students pay for these subheads goes toward operating the institutions.
"The government does not provide funding for university operations; what it does provide is overhead. For example, UniCal, a second-generation university, receives N12 million per month, but that funding will only last for seven months in 2023," the spokesperson stated.
Obi continued, "That amount is only what we use to pay the energy bill to run the university. Even if we get it for 12 months, which I doubt."
It was unthinkable, she claimed, for colleges to have been able to give the government forty percent of their IGR.
"The school cannot supply the cards if students were charged N2,000 for identity cards and 40% of that amount was given to the government."
"We are glad that wise counsel prevailed and President Bola Tinubu listened, because if that policy had gone through, it would have been the end of public universities in Nigeria," she remarked.
The VC did note, though, that adequate finance was still required for Nigerian universities to function properly.
An autonomy policy that required colleges to submit forty percent of their IGR to the government before it was abandoned was announced by the federal government.