The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) says about 34 tertiary institutions are under investigation for allegedly failing to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the federal government’s student loan scheme.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television on Sunday, Akintunde Sawyerr, managing director of NELFUND, said the agency has dispatched a five-man team, including operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and internal auditors, to the affected institutions.
Sawyerr said the probe followed a surge in complaints received from affected students.
“As of right now, there are 34 institutions that we are looking at closely with respect to this issue,” Sawyerr said.
The NELFUND boss said the refund issue followed President Bola Tinubu’s directive that the student loan scheme commence in the middle of an academic session rather than at the start of a new one, a situation that led some students to pay their tuition while awaiting loan approval.
“What happened is that a lot of schools got double payment. Some from the students, some from us,” Sawyerr said.
“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.”
The NELFUND boss said many students had relied on getting refunds after borrowing money to pay their tuition fees in order to beat registration deadlines.
According to him, while some institutions had promptly refunded affected students, others failed to do so, although he stopped short of accusing them of deliberate wrongdoing.
“Some have been very good at this. Others haven’t been so good at it,” Sawyerr said.
“I reserve judgement on the intentionality around it because, for some of them, they just didn’t have the process to make refunds.”
Sawyerr said NELFUND is exploring a tokenised payment system that would allow students to authorise tuition payments directly to their institutions, reducing the likelihood of duplicate payments.
“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,” he said.
“Paying the funds to the students, rather, quite significantly, could really lead to the temptation for them to divert and do other things.”
Sawyerr, however, acknowledged that the agency lacks the legal authority to compel institutions to refund students or prosecute erring officials.
Sawyerr said many of the complaints were submitted directly by affected students and, in some cases, copied to anti-corruption agencies.
“Students who are frustrated and unable to get their refunds write to us, but they also write to the EFCC, to the ICPC,” he said.
The NELFUND boss also expressed concern over tuition fee hikes, noting that the agency had refused to pay institutions that raised 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 who had hiked their fees beyond a certain level,” he said.
He said the agency would continue to investigate every reported irregularity while improving the implementation of the scheme.
“We tend to take the view that perhaps it’s not intentional,” he said.
“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.”
By Imoleayo Oyedeyi
