The Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND, says about 34 tertiary institutions are currently under investigation over allegations that they failed to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the Federal Government’s student loan scheme.
NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, saying the agency began the probe after receiving several petitions from affected students.
Sawyerr said NELFUND is working with anti-corruption agencies, the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, internal auditors and other stakeholders to investigate the complaints.
“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 of the number of petitions we’ve received,” he said.
According to him, the problem arose because the student loan scheme commenced in the middle of an academic session after President Bola Tinubu directed its take-off.
He explained that many students had already paid their tuition fees before NELFUND disbursed loans directly to their institutions, leading to double payments in some cases.
“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 is obliged to make refunds to the students,” Sawyerr said.
The NELFUND boss said many affected students were under pressure because they or their parents had borrowed money to pay the initial tuition fees and expected refunds after the loan payments were made.
“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,” he added.
Sawyerr said while some institutions had promptly refunded students, others had failed to do so.
“Some have been very good at this. Others haven’t been so good at it.
“I reserve judgement on the intentionality around it because for some of them, they just didn’t have the process to make refunds,” he stated.
He noted that NELFUND does not have powers of arrest or prosecution and therefore cannot directly compel institutions to refund affected students.
“We don’t have the powers of arrest, we don’t have powers of prosecution. Our hands are tied in that regard,” he said.
According to him, many frustrated students have written petitions to NELFUND and also copied the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC.
Sawyerr disclosed that one of the investigations is already being handled by a joint team comprising NELFUND officials, internal auditors, anti-corruption personnel, EFCC representatives and NANS.
“A five-person team has gone out to a specific institution that’s been accused of this to go and do an investigation,” he said.
The NELFUND boss also said the agency has refused to pay institutions that increased their fees beyond acceptable levels after the loan scheme was introduced.
“Some schools, because they get paid easily, started to put up their fees. We refused, point blank, to pay institutions that had hiked their fees beyond a certain level,” he said.
Sawyerr further disclosed that NELFUND is upgrading its payment system to allow students approve tuition payments electronically.
He said the proposed system would allow students to control the release of funds through a tokenised process.
“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,” he said.
He explained that NELFUND decided to pay tuition fees directly to institutions instead of students to prevent possible diversion of the funds.
“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 directly, quite significant funds, could really lead to the temptation for them to divert and do other things,” he said.
Sawyerr said NELFUND would continue to investigate complaints and improve its processes to prevent abuse of the student loan scheme.
“We tend to take the view that perhaps it’s not intentional.