By Sabiu Abdullahi
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has opened an investigation into 34 tertiary institutions over allegations that they failed to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the Federal Government’s student loan programme.
The Managing Director of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during an interview on Arise Television on Sunday. He said the agency had deployed a five-member investigative team, which includes officials of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and NELFUND’s internal auditors, to examine the complaints.
According to Sawyerr, the investigation followed numerous petitions from students who claimed they had not received refunds after duplicate tuition payments.
“As of right now, there are 34 institutions that we are looking at closely with respect to this issue,” Sawyerr said.
He explained that the problem arose because President Bola Tinubu directed that the student loan scheme should begin in the middle of an academic session instead of waiting for a new session. As a result, many students paid their tuition fees while waiting for their loan applications to be processed.
“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.”
Sawyerr noted that many students borrowed money to pay their school fees before registration deadlines. They expected to recover the money after NELFUND settled the same tuition charges. He said several institutions had returned the excess payments, but others had not.
“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.”
He also revealed that NELFUND is considering a tokenised payment system that would allow students to authorise tuition payments directly to their institutions. He said the measure would help prevent 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.”
Despite the ongoing investigation, Sawyerr admitted that NELFUND does not have the legal authority to compel institutions to refund students or prosecute officials involved in any wrongdoing.
He added that many of the complaints had also been forwarded to anti-corruption agencies by the affected students.
“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.
Sawyerr also raised concerns over increases in tuition fees after the launch of the student loan programme. He said NELFUND declined to pay institutions that raised their fees beyond what the agency considered acceptable.
“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 NELFUND would continue to investigate reports of irregularities as it strengthens the implementation of the student loan 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.”
