Students loan at last

Bola Tinubu
April 7, 2024

Tinubu replaces the ladder that wicked govt officials removed to deny the poor of educational opportunities

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on April 3 signed an executive bill titled “A Bill for an Act to repeal the Students Loans (Access to Higher Education) Act, 2023 and Enact the Student Loans (Access to Higher Education) Bill, 2024 to Establish the Nigerian Education Loan Fund as a body corporate to receive, manage and invest funds to provide loans to Nigerians for higher education, vocational training and skills acquisition and for related matters”.

The President struck the appropriate chord at the occasion when he said that

“This is to ensure that no one, no matter how poor their background is, is excluded from quality education and opportunity to build their future.” The ceremony took place at the State House, Abuja.

Under the Students Loan Fund, interest-free loans would be given to eligible Nigerians for higher education.

Ordinarily, this should not be news, not to talk of attracting the kind of attention that the occasion got in the media. In saner climes, students loan is routine. But this is Nigeria where governments either do not know their raison d’etre or simply do not care. They therefore leave undone those things that they should do and focus on things that they otherwise should have left undone.

It is against this sickening background that President Tinubu signing the students loan bill becomes significant, if not historic. 

Nigeria’s first attempt at such a facility was in 1972 when the Nigerian Students Loans Board was established. The board reportedly provided loans of about N46 million between 1973 and 1991 to help Nigerian students finance their university education, either in the country or abroad. Unfortunately the rate of loan recovery was low and this apparently killed the otherwise laudable scheme.

But it needed not be so. Just that governments in this part of the world are characteristically lazy and corrupt. What needed to be done was to examine the template of the scheme to see the loopholes and plug them. Nigerians are not necessarily worse than most other nationals when it comes to loan repayment. The problem is that, unlike other nations, Nigeria does not have the necessary data with which to monitor loan defaulters.

Until very recently, the country’s attempt at providing Nigerians with National Identity Number (NIN) had continually failed. This would have solved a lot of identity problems.

 Since the death of the 1972 loan scheme, I do not think there has been any genuine attempt at revamping the scheme until now.

Therefore, we must commend the Tinubu administration for being this thoughtful. The idea of students loan was one of his campaign promises and it is praiseworthy that he is working assiduously toward making it a reality.

The scheme would have taken off since last year but had to be postponed to fine-tune it in line with present realities and make its impact better felt by the beneficiaries and the country.

Even in Nigeria’s golden era, there were different sources for students to get money and therefore have hitch-free academic pursuits. Some had both scholarships and loans, some had more than one scholarship, etc.

I guess what many of us grew up to know were bursary awards that some state governments used to give to augment the resources of their students in tertiary institutions. At the University of Lagos where I graduated, students looked forward to their bursaries and everybody around knew that money was not the problem of the students but how to spend it when they had collected the bursaries. I never got bursary but that was by choice.

But if ever there is a time that students need assistance to further their studies in Nigeria, it is now. What with the skyrocketing cost of living that has made things difficult for most people. Even the nouveau riche are also groaning under the present economic stress.

Whenever I see what many of our university students are going through these days, I pity them because, even if my generation did not have the best of life in our university days, it was not completely bad. We still had something to write home about. One, we still looked forward to decent meals in our cafeterias for as cheap as 50 kobo per meal! A month’s meal ticket in the universities then was N45.00 (forty-five naira only!) On Sundays, we had jollof rice (I mean jollof rice, not concoction) and chicken to boot, for lunch. Nobody dared serve you chicken legs or other unworthy parts of the chicken. I was even luckier in my own case as I had already gotten used to that right from my Higher School Certificate days at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Ondo, where I did my ‘Advance Level’ programme. We were always served the same menu on Sundays.

In other words, some of us still met the remnants of what our seniors enjoyed before the source of those good times dried up. My children and the children of many of my contemporaries always listened with awe whenever we tell these stories. They could never imagine that Nigeria was still talking about kobo as legal tender as recently as the late 1980s. Today, we do not even know what the kobo looks like because it cannot buy sweets or biscuits for babies.

The wickedness in high places in Nigeria that I am trying to point out is that

many of those who killed scholarship, bursary and loans to indigent Nigerians had life so easy in their own time in school. But, having got to the top, they removed the ladder, thereby denying others its use. The President alluded to the fact that those of them at the signing ceremony are in their respective positions because they were “helped” to get education: “We are here because we are all educated and were helped…”

 It was that ladder (read help) that Tinubu replaced on April 3.

Education is the bedrock of development. Many other countries that we were together on the back bench of development a few decades ago have since moved forward and abandoned us to our fate. Our country is perhaps the place where the phrase ;’moving the country forward’ is parroted most in the world; but it has become a cliche because this is not from the heart of hearts of those saying it.

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We have seen what lack of education can cause with the banditry, terrorism, etc. that we have been dealing with, especially in the northern part of the country. What is painful is that those who mortgaged the future of these youths who have been depriving others of their sleep in the name of culture and religion are still roaming the streets free, enjoying their ill-gotten wealth, while the entire country is paying the price of that elite that ate their youths’ future yesterday. This, for me, is the most painful aspect of it all.

It is however gratifying that some of the states in the north seem to have realised the importance of education and are trying everything possible to encourage their children to go to school. The truth of the matter is that many of these children are brilliant; what they lack are opportunities to pass through the four walls of schools. They should be encouraged to join other parts of the country to take advantage of the students loan scheme.

 One can only imagine what would have been the fate of the numerous educated elites that the defunct Western Region produced if Chief Obafemi Awolowo had not introduced free education in the region. This is the kind of ‘help’ that Tinubu mentioned while signing the document. Yes, many parents in the region were, having known the value of western education, ready to do everything to send their children to school, even far back as that time. Some even sold their property because they knew that a child that was not educated would end up selling whatever property that is bequeathed to him (for peanuts). There is no time I write on this topic that I forget to recall the tribute that one of my seniors in the university, one ‘Perrow’ (not real name), paid to his parents in his final year thesis. He said he would forever be grateful to his parents ‘who gladly embraced poverty to give him Western education’. You may consider it an oxymoron, but that was what many parents literally did in the Western Region about five decades ago. Parents all over the country must buy this idea to lift the country from the abyss to greatness.

I am happy that the new bill also provides for vocational training and skills development programmes. Not every child can make it to the university and not every child would be interested in tertiary or university education. That some children would not want tertiary education or cannot get it should not deprive them of realising their dreams.

One other thing that gladdens my heart about this scheme is that it would mop up a lot of money that forms the basis of the humongous stealing in government. It is because there is a lot of idle funds in government coffers that people find it easy to steal in billions what should have been spent to provide services or infrastructure for Nigerians. This cannot be the case in a situation where government literally ‘scavenge’ for funds to finance their programmes and projects.

Also, the terms and conditions for the loan seem satisfying. At least they addressed a lot of the inadequacies and fears of the earlier bill. For instance, family income threshold is no longer important, likewise guarantor; also, applicants may apply for loans to cover tuition and other fees payable to the school and maintenance allowance payable to the student, among other improvements on the previous iteration.

But we all know that Nigeria is never bereft of good ideas. The problem has always had to do with implementation. That is my fear even on this loan scheme. I have a feeling that some criminals in the country would be getting ready to corrupt the process. I therefore urge the government to give the managing authority all the desired support to keep its data safe because that would be key to the success of the scheme.

Moreover, revamping the economy must be the focus of government while security and power supply should also be improved upon. It is when all of these are done that jobs would be available and loan beneficiaries can be able to repay their loans, thus enhancing its revolving nature.

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