Recently, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed into law the Student Loans Bill. The bill was conceived way back in 2016 after I submitted a proposal to the Senior Special Assistant to President Buhari on Student Matters. Being a friend, I suggested to him to allow me draft a proposal on student loans, which he readily accepted.
The reason why I made the suggestion was because I knew that most countries have a student loans scheme which supplements scholarships and target talented students from poor families to enable them have university education.
When I researched the matter, I found out that since the early 1970s, the Nigerian government under the military had a decree that allowed for the establishment of a Education Bank.
The reason I focused my attention on the issue was considering we had a new government in 2016 that carried tremendous goodwill from the people and Buhari was expected to turn around the country, and also the United Nations projection of Nigeria’s population to become the third largest after India and China with 400 million people come 2050 was enough to excite one’s concern about the future of education in a country where many are so poor.
Nigeria had, over the decades, failed to even reach the UN threshold of 15% commitment of national income to the educational sector for developing countries. Education statistics in northern Nigeria are the worst in the world, as millions of children couldn’t even go to school let alone have a vision of university education.
The North is more populous than any other region in West Africa, yet it has the highest number of poverty and illiteracy. That is why I thought a student loan could mitigate the shortfall of university graduants in the country, moreso as cutting federal funding for universities is just a matter of when, not if.
In my original proposal I suggested the resuscitation and expansion of the Education Bank to be funded by the Federal Government in order to enable it offer an interest-free loan to students in tertiary institutions.
The bank should have branches in all the 36 states of the Federation and Abuja and target at least 500 students from each local government to be offered the loan for the four years of university education.
The proposal also suggested offering grants to authors and artists to help them publish their works, as well as to the youth with special talent and or special skills.
The loan should not only cover tuition but also vocational skills to university students to enable them learn entrepreneurial skills based on their area of studies. For example, those undergoing Agriculture courses should be able to have loan to invest in fishery, poultry, animal husbandry, etc., so that on graduation they have businesses to depend on and not wait for government jobs that are not available. In my proposal, based on how other countries make the repayment regime very favourable to graduands, I suggested a 1-10 year period and for those incapacitated or dead should have automatic cancellation of repayments, because the idea for the loan is to enable youth get education and learn vocational skills to contribute towards the development of the country. Besides, we have seen in recent times how individual politicians and civil servants steal billions that could be worth a whole year’s budget of an institution like the Education Bank and are roaming freely.
The Bill signed into law by the President includes the creation of the Nigeria Education Bank which will be funded from 1% of the total revenue of the Federal Government accrued to the FIRS, Immigration and Customs (that is tens of billions per annum).
The law also includes a provision for the ASUU to be represented on the bank’s board, offer interest-free loans, including vocational training school as beneficiaries, but restricts the repayment period to a mere two years. Finally, it also pegged the family income of beneficiaries not to be higher than N500,000 per annum.
After studying the act, my position is that there is a need for further amendment of the law. Foremost reasons are as follows:
- The two-year repayment period doesn’t consider the rate of our current unemployment rate and how some graduates spent years without job.
- The exclusion of vocational training for university students should also be revisited because it has more potential of enabling students repay the loans and create jobs.
- There is also the need for the family income ceiling to be raised and the referees criteria amended. The family income should be raised higher considering there may be even middle-income families with many children to support, thus their wards should also have opportunity to seek the loan. The bar for referees could elude many of the poor families targeted; instead, I think ward heads, district heads, local leaders and even university lecturers should be more appropriate to stand in as guarantors, being closer to the beneficiaries.
I want to draw the attention of people, especially northerners, seeing how many of our people misunderstood the student loan scheme, thus making all kinds of negative comments in the media and sharing propaganda from the detractors of the programme. Northerners, as the law stands today, stand the chance of benefitting more from it than the citizens from the counterpart regions, for the simple fact that we have the highest population of youth that couldn’t attend university for financial reasons.
I also believe 60-70% of parents that could fall within the threshold of earning no more than N500,000 in the country would be northerners due to our social setup. In most Muslum households in the north, the father is the sole bread winner and none of his wives or children contributes significantly to the running cost of the family.
Soon, I believe, government will totally withdraw its subsidy on education and few families could afford the new range of tuition fees that is bound to follow. The student loan scheme stands to benefit the northerners more if only the communities understand the system and enlighten their people to quickly grasp the opportunity.
NGOs, traditional institutions, local authorities, the media, politicians and opinion leaders should embark on a vigorous campaign for our youth to access the facility that is going to be online this September and only God knows how much will be injected to the bank.
ASUU, as a stakeholder in the Education Bank, should stop blaming the policy as if it is the one responsible for the government’s withdrawal of its funding. The student loan idea began in 2016 from my proposal, long before the Buhari government ignored ASUU’s call for funding despite the longest industrial strike in our history.
The writing on the wall was apparent to all discerning minds that the way government allows private universities to operate in the country is a clear indication of its surreptitious withdrawal of its funding. It had been a matter of when, not if, of finding ourselves in this situation where the government is withdrawing its support. The introduction of the student loan scheme came at the right time to enable poor families see their children in universities.
Finally, I would appeal to northern lawmakers in the National Assembly to undertake the responsibility of seeing the amendment of the student loan act as among its first priority in putting it back to its original proposal and repel the constrains as enumerated above to enable wider and smoother application of the law for the benefit of improving education across the country, especially in the North that has deficit. Northerners should understand that even if the law continue to exist as it is, they are going to be the biggest beneficiaries, if only its people are sensitised enough and in time to access its full benefit.
We should also realise that there are people who will find access to the student loan restricted by the criteria, the reason why some are spreading all kinds of propaganda to disparage and paint it black for those who can, in the meantime, access it. We should realise that everything has its pros and cons and there is nothing that is perfect, but we should always exploit the imperfect and strive towards making it perfect.
* Ali Abubakar Sadiq writes from Kano
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