The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, has refuted allegation of large-scale looting rocking the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND).
Alausa said the recent controversies emanated from delayed reporting by universities rather than corruption, stressing that there was no case of N70 billion loot at the agency.
He addressed concerns that followed a retracted Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) report, which alleged that N70 billion of NELFUND’s N100 billion was misappropriated, saying it was “sensationalised”.
“There’s been a lot of sensationalisation in the news on NELFUND in the last few days. The ICPC report saying almost N70 billion was not used to service children’s education was retracted. It wasn’t true,” Alausa said.
The minister explained that the issue arose from universities failing to promptly notify students about fee payments made by NELFUND.
“What happened is that fees, sometimes going into hundreds of millions of naira, get paid to the universities, but they don’t notify the students. The students are anxious, thinking their fees haven’t been paid,” he said.
Alausa outlined government’s plans to address the issue, saying: “We’ve quickly set up guidelines, which we will be discussing with the universities today. We will give timelines on when universities get NELFUND fees and the duration they need to inform students.”
The minister assured Nigerians that NELFUND remained a “legacy intervention” for the benefit of over 500,000 students and reaffirmed the ministry’s zero-tolerance for fraud.
He added: “It wasn’t a case that N100 billion got released to NELFUND and N70 billion was looted. Absolutely not! The process we have now has no mechanism for that to ever happen.”
