The Federal Government has approved a loan of N110 billion to students of public tertiary institutions nationwide.
Sixty percent of the sum from this current academic session will be paid to the institutions where successful applicants study. The remaining 40 percent will go directly to the beneficiaries as an upkeep allowance.
Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), the government agency in charge of the loan scheme introduced by President Bola Tinubu, has 328,000 applications on its portal and 417,000 registrants.
NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr made these known to reporters during the induction of members of the agency’s Servicom unit in Abuja yesterday.
Sawyerr said: “We’ve just approved a new batch, N110 billion that is going to students in one form or another.
‘’About 60 percent of that is going directly to their institutions in full because we pay 100 percent of fees. Forty percent has been disbursed in terms of their actual upkeep. The upkeep figure is slightly behind the total fee.
“We estimate that amongst the constituency that we’re responsible for, people in tertiary institutions that are government-owned, which are defined as universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education, and the rafts of students that are going to be coming in for the next session, we estimate that our commitment to date is to people somewhere in the region of 2.1 million.
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“It’s an estimate, and it gets bigger than that when we start our skills programme, because there we have a lot more.
“We have about 417,000 students who have registered on our portal. With the details we have, about 328,000 students have actually applied.
“Some of them have been processed, many of them have been looked at and most of them will get the loan. But it’s important to also mention that we are growing by about 1,000 applications a day. At the height of it, we had 9,000 applications in one day.
“I should also mention that those who registered may choose not to go ahead and apply, or may want to get more information, but at least they’re captured in the system (portal). They know they’re in the system. So that’s why you have this gap between 417,000 registrants and 328,000 applicants.
‘’We often find that the number of applicants is ahead of the number of registrants, which means that people are suddenly deciding or making up their minds to then apply after they’ve registered.”
On the repayment method, Sawyerr said ‘’students who apply for this loan today get an interest-free loan.’’
‘’What they apply for and are given or benefit from is exactly what they will pay back. It’s interesting because they don’t pay it back immediately.
What happens is that two years after National Youth Service is complete, they are then obliged to report to us their status in terms of employment,” the NELFUND boss added.
National Coordinator of SEVICOM Nnenna Akajemeli said the SEVICOM unit would help the inductees to run the government business.
She explained that the inductees were mandated to reach out to brilliant indigent Nigerians interested in going to school but do not have access to funds.
“They(inductees) are to manage this process and ensure that they bring about quality graduates, ” Akajemeli added.
On November 25, Sawyerr told the House of Representatives Committee on Student Loans and Higher Education Financing that NELFUND had disbursed N12 billion to students as loans.
He added that 120,000 students had received or were penciled in for stipends from the body.
He said: “Exposure in terms of what we have disbursed is about N12 billion. I believe we are going to be doing some further disbursements this week which will take that number to about N20 billion.
‘’We have something in the region of 120,000 people who have received stipends or about to.”
Under the scheme NELFUND pays the fees of successful applicant directly to the institution of learning and pays a monthly stipend of N20,000 to the student as upkeep.
