The Nigerian Education Loan Fund is investigating about 34 tertiary institutions over allegations that they failed to refund students who made tuition payments before receiving financial support under the Federal Government’s student loan scheme.
The Punch reported that the Managing Director of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, stating that the agency launched the probe following numerous complaints from affected students.
According to him, the investigations involve anti-corruption agencies, the National Association of Nigerian Students, internal auditors and other relevant stakeholders.
He said: “I can tell you that there are about 34 institutions that we are looking at at the moment to see what’s going on because the number of petitions we’ve received.”
Sawyerr explained that the problem stemmed from the mid-session rollout of the student loan programme after President Bola Tinubu approved its implementation. As a result, many students had already paid their tuition before their loan applications were processed, leading to duplicate payments.
“What happened is that a lot of schools got double payment. Some from the students, some from us.
“The refund process is entirely out of our hands. It is the recipient of the double payments that are obliged to make refunds to the students,” the NELFUND boss added.
He stressed that delayed refunds have placed financial pressure on many students and their families, who often relied on borrowed funds to settle school fees.
“Most students in this country are hard up. They don’t have enough money for themselves.
“So when they make payment for their education and then they take a loan for the same education, they expect their money to be refunded to them.
“Some of them have borrowed the funds, their parents have borrowed the funds, and they need to repay those funds,” Sawyerr noted.
The NELFUND chief acknowledged that while some institutions had refunded affected students without delay, others had been slow to do so.
He continued: “Some have been very good at this. Others haven’t been so good at it.
“I reserve judgement on, you know, the intentionality around it because for some of them, they just didn’t have the process to make refunds.”
To reduce future occurrences, Sawyerr revealed that the agency is developing a new payment system that will enable students to authorise tuition payments electronically.
“We’re looking at a tokenised system where the student has the funds effectively as a token on their telephone and when they go to the bursary, they can effectively push a button that makes the payment,” NELFUND boss declared.
He explained that NELFUND intentionally pays tuition fees directly to institutions rather than students to minimise the risk of misuse of loan funds.
He further stated: “We chose in our setting up of this not to pay students directly for the loans because that would take us into an entirely new area.
“Paying the funds to the students rather, quite significant, could really lead to the temptation for them to divert and do other things.”
Sawyerr, however, admitted that the agency lacks the legal authority to compel institutions to refund students or prosecute those found culpable.
“We don’t have the powers of arrest, we don’t have powers of prosecution. We really, our hands are tied in that regard,” he said.
He noted that many students had escalated their complaints beyond NELFUND by petitioning anti-corruption agencies.
He said: “Students who are frustrated and unable to get their refunds write to us, but they also write to the EFCC, to the ICPC.”
According to Sawyerr, one of the ongoing investigations is being handled by a joint team made up of NELFUND officials, internal auditors, anti-corruption personnel, representatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and NANS.
“A five-person team have gone out to a specific institution that’s been accused of this to go and do an investigation,” he said.
Speaking on concerns over rising tuition fees, the NELFUND boss said the agency had refused to honour payment requests from institutions that increased their fees excessively after the introduction of the loan scheme.
“Some schools, because they get paid easily startes to put up their fees, we refused, point blank, to pay institutions who had hiked their fees beyond a certain level,” Sawyerr asserted.
He added that the agency remains cautious in handling the allegations while continuing its internal reviews.
“We tend to take the view that perhaps it’s not intentional.
“We institute many investigations, we generate many reports, any small hint of anything going wrong, we set up a small committee to look at it because we’re trying to learn,” he concluded.
