The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to tackle alleged abuse of its student loan scheme by beneficiaries who receive tuition support while continuing to rely on their parents to pay their school fees.
The initiative will also introduce a mechanism for parents to verify whether their children’s tuition fees have been paid through the government-backed loan scheme.
NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this on Wednesday during a press briefing, saying the fund had identified cases of students allegedly benefiting from the scheme while still placing the financial burden of tuition payments on their parents.
Describing the practice as unacceptable, Sawyerr said the fund was determined to strengthen accountability and transparency in the administration of the programme.
“This comment is based on our recognition that there are so many students out there who are double-dipping. They are taking from the NELFUND and still stressing their parents,” he said.
“We are going to put an end to that.”
Under the proposed arrangement, parents would be able to confirm whether their children’s school fees had been paid through NELFUND without necessarily accessing the actual amount involved.
Sawyerr said the initiative was designed to address concerns among parents who continue to shoulder educational expenses despite the availability of government-backed loans.
As part of efforts to improve understanding of the scheme, NELFUND will organise re-education workshops across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones.
According to Sawyerr, the exercise will educate students, parents and tertiary institutions on the loan payment process and changes introduced to improve the programme’s administration.
He explained that the workshops would go beyond routine public awareness campaigns by providing stakeholders with clearer information on institutional payments, upkeep allowances and the documentation required of beneficiaries.
“We can easily do a press release and say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’ But if we don’t educate the institutions, if we don’t educate the students, everybody will still be running behind,” he said.
“This is not sensitisation. This is re-education of the stakeholders and the students as to the changes that we have made in their favour,” he added.
The managing director urged the media to support the information campaign, noting that the regional workshops alone might not reach all students requiring clarification.
Meanwhile, NELFUND Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, explained that the fund’s payment system was designed to reduce intermediaries in processing institutional fees.
Iyal said NELFUND uses students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers for institutional payment processing rather than their conventional bank account numbers.
“To be clear, we don’t use account numbers. We use their application ID and wallet number,” he said.
He explained that institutional fees and upkeep allowances were processed separately, with tuition payments handled through the fund’s institutional payment arrangement, while upkeep allowances were transferred to beneficiaries’ personal bank accounts through external payment platforms.
According to him, NELFUND uses platforms such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack to process upkeep payments because it is not a banking institution and cannot open bank accounts for beneficiaries.
He added that transactions could sometimes be delayed depending on the financial institutions involved in processing the payments.
Providing an update on the scale of operations, Iyal disclosed that the pilot phase covered approximately 400,000 students, with about 20,000 additional students recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing.
He also said the system processed transactions for nearly 5,000 students daily.
“We are not talking about 20,000. No, we are talking about 400,000,” he said, emphasising the scale of the operation.
Iyal further explained that the system used a tokenised arrangement linked to each student’s application identification number, with a wallet attached to the application.
He said the upkeep wallet operated separately from the mechanism for institutional payments, highlighting the distinction between tuition fees paid to schools and allowances transferred directly to students.
