The Nigerian Education Loan Fund is investigating about 34 tertiary institutions over allegations that they failed to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the Federal Government’s student loan scheme, Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr has said.
Speaking in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, Sawyerr said the agency launched the investigations following a surge in petitions from affected students and is working with anti-corruption agencies, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), internal auditors and other 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 issue arose after President Bola Tinubu directed that the loan scheme commence midway into the academic session, resulting in some students paying their tuition before later receiving NELFUND loans.
“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 said many students depended on the refunds to repay money borrowed by themselves or their families.
“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.
According to Sawyerr, while some institutions had processed refunds promptly, others had not.
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.”
He disclosed that NELFUND was upgrading its payment system to allow students 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.
Sawyerr said the agency deliberately pays tuition directly to institutions rather than students to reduce the risk of diversion.
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.”
He acknowledged that NELFUND has no legal powers to compel institutions to issue refunds or prosecute offenders.
“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.
Sawyerr said many complaints were submitted directly by affected students and, in some cases, copied to anti-corruption agencies.
He noted, “Students who are frustrated and unable to get their refunds write to us, but they also write to the EFCC, to the ICPC.”
He added that one investigation involved a joint team comprising NELFUND officials, internal auditors, anti-corruption personnel, representatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) 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.
Addressing concerns over tuition increases, Sawyerr said NELFUND had declined to pay institutions that raised fees beyond acceptable levels after the scheme was introduced.
“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 said the agency was taking a measured approach while investigations continue.
“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.
