LAST week, in fulfillment of his campaign promise, President Bola Tinubu signed into law the Student Loan Bill as part of the initial welcoming actions and policies of his government. The bill sponsored by the Speaker of the Ninth House of Representatives and current Chief of Staff to the President, Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila, provides for interest-free loans to indigent Nigerian students. The stated objective is to provide easy access to higher education for poor Nigerians through interest-free loans from the Nigerian Education Loan Fund. The criteria for accessing the loan have been clearly spelt out.
Following the signing of the bill, stakeholders in the educational sector such as the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) commended the president for the initiative while a few others, including the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), kicked against it, citing, among other factors, the imminence of the introduction of tuition fees in the public universities, which could shut millions of students out of higher education. It is, of course, possible to want to commend the government for showing its awareness of the crucial need of Nigerian youth in the area of funding their education, but we hasten to add that it is unprofitable to introduce a loan scheme without outlining and putting in place the necessary structures and reforms that would make the scheme to achieve the intended objectives.
Apparently, there are questions, including the possibility of political interference in disbursing the loans and the question of the incongruity of punishing defaulters who have been unable to get a job, that cannot be shied away from. More crucially, the fact cannot be ignored that while the economies of countries like the United States support student loans, the Nigerian economy does not. The implication is that even if the provision of student loans increases the number of graduates by expanding access to education, it cannot guarantee the availability of jobs. That means that without taking a critical look at the number of jobless graduates and making the economy robust, the scheme is doomed to failure. Where is the power to support entrepreneurship, say? It is clear that Nigerian structures are so bedeviled with corruption as to make them almost always ineffective and inefficient, such that simply adding other structures to the existing corrupt ecosystem without attempting to devise cleaning initiatives would be an exercise in futility.
In particular, the Nigerian university system, and indeed the entire tertiary education system, is in the doldrums arising from incessant strikes and inchoate polices that have left it prostrate. For instance, the National Industrial Court recently ruled on the illegality of the salary paying system imposed by the government on the universities and other tertiary institutions even while affirming the legality of not paying workers on strike. This judgment has serious implications for the running of universities and other tertiary institutions, particularly the public ones, even as the government has not come up with clarifications on the implications of the judgment. Surely, without adequate reforms to make the system more result-oriented and effective, it would be difficult to expect other policies to function well.
We expect the government to go beyond the formal introduction of the student loan scheme and urgently address the problems of tertiary education in the country in a comprehensive manner. It must be prepared to tweak the regulations of the loan scheme in the light of necessary changes thrown up by qualitative reforms.
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