The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has explained the reasons behind the observed disparities in the payment of students’ upkeep allowances under the new scheme.
In an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja, NELFUND Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr attributed the disparities to the timing of applications, institutional processes, and the evolving nature of the initiative.
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The NELFUND boss acknowledged that, while the Fund had received several complaints from students regarding delayed stipends, many of the issues arose from procedural and timing differences across institutions.
“It is not possible to have this kind of scheme without having a complaint somewhere. We receive complaints every day here, about one thing or the other.
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“When we analyse the complaints, some of them are our fault, some of them are not our fault.
“Some students will tell you that they have been waiting for their stipend, they have not gotten it.
“When you asked, how long have you been waiting, when did you apply? They will say, last year.
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“When we look at the books, however, we will discover that they only applied the previous week.
“When it comes to money, people want to see how fast they can get it,” he said.
He further explained that students’ varying academic calendars and application timelines had made synchronisation of upkeep payments complex.
“This is a relatively new scheme. This is not a scheme that has been running for 10 years or 20 years, where you can say, Ok, we have these people that we are paying.
“Remember that we are dealing with students who are applying at different times, who are at institutions with different timetables, who are at different stages, in terms of where they are in their sessions.
“The complexity of start date, end date, as people graduate, sessions close, a new session begins, is not small,” he stated.
Mr Sawyerr, however, said that the Fund would not make retrospective payments to avoid cases of double disbursement.
According to him, to avoid double payments, once students apply for a new session and they begin the processing, they will stop payments for the previous session, irrespective of how many months’ stipend they have received.
He admitted, however, that many students misunderstood the process because it had not been clearly explained before.
“The truth about it is that we are dealing with many different date points in this business.
“A session is generally 12 months. Nine of the 12 months is the period that people are actually in schools.
“If a student applies for the loan in time, maybe, based on the school calendar and it is approved, and we start disbursement at the beginning of the session, the student may receive 12 months upkeep stipend.
“If another student applies, maybe in the middle of the session, such student will only receive what is left, which might be six months or so.
“We will not pay people backwards. Once students apply for the new session, they will start receiving their monthly stipends from the month it is approved till the end of the session.
Once you apply for another new session, let’s say, 2025/2026, and we start processing it, we will stop payment for the previous session of 2024/2025.
“If we do not handle the process like this, we will find ourselves in a situation where we are paying people double,” he clarified.
On the issue of refunding excess fees, the NELFUND chief said the Fund had been encouraging institutions to return excess payments, where both students and the Fund had paid for the same session.
According to him, when students apply for the loan, it takes some time to process because they have to carry out due diligence.
“Part of that due diligence is that the institutions have to verify and confirm to us that the people who applied for the loan and whose names were forwarded to them are their students,
“They must also verify the approvals and send them back to us.
“These processes are time-consuming, but they are worth carrying out.
“By the time the confirmation has been done, and we are through with our final checks and disburse the funds to the institutions on behalf of the students, sometimes, it might not meet the deadline set by the school, and the students might have paid
“Unfortunately, all we can do is to encourage the schools to refund to the students the money they paid to the school.
“We cannot force the money out of the schools, but we are encouraging the schools to make a refund,” he said.
He, however, disclosed that the Federal Ministry of Education would soon take a firmer stance to ensure institutions refund such excess payments timeously, rather than carrying them over into a new academic year.
Addressing reports of schools inflating tuition fees, the NELFUND head clarified that institutions themselves input the official fee structures into the student verification system.
“Apart from all the other information that we asked for, the schools, on our student verification system, provide us with the fees for each course.
“If the fee is N80,000, they load it there as N80,000. If the fee for another course is N200,000, they will load it on our system as N200,000.
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“When a student applies for the loan, they can see what amount is uploaded on their portal.
“If it is higher than what it should be, they can challenge it, and say, ‘My course is N180,000, but on the portal, I saw it as N200,000.’
“They have always been able to challenge that process,” he explained.
Mr Sawyerr recalled that because of initial hitches when the programme started, some schools failed to provide timely data, and the Fund improvised, but it had since been resolved and corrected.
“We put in some arbitrary figures, so that the system could work and the students could apply for the loan.
“Then, retrospectively, we went and changed the figures to the actual ones,” he said.
He assured continuous improvement in the system to nip hitches and discrepancies in the bud and enhance transparency of the process.
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