Why We Can’t Disburse School Fees To Freshers -NELFUND

Why can’t the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) disburse institutional or school fees to freshers before they complete their registration processes.

This is the knotty question that NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, has been responding to.

He said doing so ahead could simply result in the fund suffering large-scale financial losses.

“If we pay fees for students who have not entered, what if they change their minds and don’t go to the schools anymore?”, he qeried in the course of an interaction with NAN.

“We cannot just say because somebody has been admitted to a school, and we will pay the fees before registering or matriculating,” he said.

Sawyer said that disbursing school fees to freshers in that manner, would amount to disbursing against intention, a practice he warned could be financially risky for the government.

“If we carry on like that, we could end up disbursing billions of naira, only to find out that they have dropped out, got admission to a school outside the country, gone to another school, or not doing that course again,” he said

He identified the admission process whereby a student would need a matriculation number to access the loan

as another key challenge in the bid to support students with funds

As much as these problems are there, he stated that NELFUND was working closely with tertiary institutions to find a temporary solution.

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One such solution according to him, would be for students to use their Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board registration numbers as a substitute for matriculation numbers.

“There are many genuine students who have applied, and they need a matriculation number to be able to process their fees.

“The challenge is that they cannot get their matriculation number until they have matriculated, and they cannot matriculate until they have paid.

“We are trying to work with the schools to see how those who have registered can use their JAMB registration number as a substitute,” he added.

Reflectivity, he said the first law establishing NELFUND, signed on June 12, 2023, had several flaws, including the requirement for guarantors and income limits that excluded many households.

“One of the flaws was the requirement for a guarantor, which we saw as a difficult position to put students in;

“If you need a guarantor, it means that you need to go out and plead with somebody or pay somebody.

“The second was that the 2023 Act stated that any family that had a household income in excess of N500,000 was not eligible.

“We all know that N500,000 is a very small amount of money for a household over a whole year.

“So, it meant that many people would not be able to apply for the loan.,” he said.

He said that the process of disbursing school fees to freshers faced other encumbrances that made President Bola Tinubu to  initiate a repeal of the initial law, leading to the drafting of a new Education Loan Act, which was passed and launched in May 2024.

“From May 2024, when we started, and now, we are delighted that, not for a single day has the site crashed, even as we received unanticipated high demand.

“We have been able to receive applications on a steady basis, process them, pay students and their institutions from what has been allocated to us,” he said