No student will be prevented from writing exams due to fee non-payment – NELFUND

Akintunde Sawyerr, head of Nigeria Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), has promised that students waiting for loan payments will not be stopped from taking their exams.

This follows reports that some universities were stopping students because their tuition fees had not yet arrived from the government.

Sawyerr explained that the agency is working closely with schools like UNIBEN and LAUTECH to fix these delays. He admitted that while the workload is heavy, the well-being of students is the top priority.

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Why payments are delayed

Sawyerr explained that checking and sending out government money takes time to ensure there is no corruption.

“Because these systems require proper processes when you’re disbursing government funds, it is important that we use the processes we’ve designed and approved to ensure that we don’t have any sort of misappropriation of these funds,” Akintunde Sawyerr said.

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He also noted that because every school has its own calendar, it is difficult to match payments perfectly with exam dates. “Students apply when they choose to apply, we don’t enforce an application date. Universities, polytechnics and colleges of education all set their own registration dates and examination dates, and those differ across the country.”

On the agreement with universities To protect students, NELFUND has asked universities to let students write their exams while they wait for the money to arrive.

“What we’ve been able to do is negotiate very ably with many institutions to say, if the students applied late or verification was delayed, please allow the students to write their exams,” Sawyerr stated. He added, “The institutions are now somewhat assured that the payment will come, so they are very amenable.”

Success of the loan scheme Despite the delays, the program is growing quickly. Sawyerr shared figures showing how many are currently using the system.

“To date, we’ve paid 265 tertiary institutions. We have about 1.5 million applications being processed, and we have just under a million beneficiaries that we are paying money to every month,” Sawyerr said. He also mentioned, “In the last 24 hours alone, we’ve had about 8,000 applications.”

Ngozi Ekugo is a Senior Correspondent at BusinessDay. She holds a Masters in management from the University of Lagos, an undergraduate from University of Lagos, and is in an alumni of Queen's College. Shes currently an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM). She has a brief experience at Goldman sachs, London in its Human Capital Management division. She is interested in human capital development and is leveraging her varied experience across sectors to report labour and global mobility trends for stakeholders to make informed decisions.

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