Unpaid students’ refunds: About 34 institutions under investigation — NELFUND

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has said about 34 tertiary institutions are under investigation over allegations that they failed to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the Federal Government’s student loan scheme.

Speaking during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, said the agency began the investigations after receiving many petitions from affected students. He said NELFUND is working with anti-corruption agencies, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), internal auditors and other stakeholders.

He said: “I can tell you that there are about 34 institutions that we are looking at at the moment to see what’s going on because the number of petitions we’ve received.”

Sawyerr explained that the issue started after President Bola Tinubu directed that the student loan scheme begin in the middle of an academic session. As a result, many students had already paid their tuition before receiving NELFUND loans.

“What happened is that a lot of schools got double payment. Some from the students, some from us.

“The refund process is entirely out of our hands. It is the recipient of the double payments that are obliged to make refunds to the students,” the NELFUND boss added.

He said many students were waiting for the refunds because they or their parents borrowed money to pay the school fees.

“Most students in this country are hard up. They don’t have enough money for themselves.

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“So when they make payment for their education and then they take a loan for the same education, they expect their money to be refunded to them.

“Some of them have borrowed the funds, their parents have borrowed the funds, and they need to repay those funds,” Sawyerr noted.

According to him, while some institutions refunded students quickly, others had not done so.

He continued: “Some have been very good at this. Others haven’t been so good at it.

“I reserve judgement on, you know, the intentionality around it because for some of them, they just didn’t have the process to make refunds.”

Sawyerr said NELFUND is upgrading its payment system to allow students approve tuition payments electronically.

“We’re looking at a tokenised system where the student has the funds effectively as a token on their telephone and when they go to the bursary, they can effectively push a button that makes the payment,” the NELFUND boss declared.

He said the agency chose to pay tuition fees directly to institutions instead of students to reduce the risk of the money being diverted.

“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.

“Paying the funds to the students rather, quite significant, could really lead to the temptation for them to divert and do other things.”

Sawyerr also said NELFUND does not have the legal power to force institutions to refund students or prosecute anyone.

“We don’t have the powers of arrest, we don’t have powers of prosecution. We really, our hands are tied in that regard,” he said.

He added that many affected students reported the matter to NELFUND and also copied anti-corruption agencies in their complaints.

“Students who are frustrated and unable to get their refunds write to us, but they also write to the EFCC, to the ICPC.”

According to him, one of the investigations is already being handled by a joint team made up of NELFUND officials, internal auditors, anti-corruption personnel, representatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and NANS.

“A five-person team have gone out to a specific institution that’s been accused of this to go and do an investigation,” he said.

Sawyerr also said NELFUND has refused to pay institutions that increased their tuition fees beyond acceptable levels after the loan scheme was introduced.

“Some schools, because they get paid easily startes to put up their fees, we refused, point blank, to pay institutions who had hiked their fees beyond a certain level,” Sawyerr asserted.

He said the agency would continue to investigate complaints while improving the system.

“We tend to take the view that perhaps it’s not intentional.

“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,” he concluded.