Kayode Olanrewaju 
Against the backdrop of the Federal Government’s exclusion of students of tertiary institutions as beneficiaries of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFund), on based of financial status of their parents, a retired don at the University of Ibadan (UI), Prof Ademola Dasylva, has described such action as parochial, unjust and prejudicial against the students.
This is as he stated that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Federal Government decision on excising or excluding private universities from benefiting from the student loan scheme.
He noted that the basic concept of the award of the student loan was not only faulty, but that its execution is also premised on a bunch of contradictions.
The Student Loan initiative was set up by the Federal Government, under the Students Education Loan Act, as a beacon of hope for Nigerian students pursuing higher education, which assured Nigerians that no indigent students would be denied the government education student loan scheme.
Buttressing his position, he noted that more than 40 per cent of the students in private higher institutions are from average or middle level income earning, such as lecturers and civil servants, who find it difficult to pay their children’s school fees, but for the various crises in public universities they have to commit their little resources.
Therefore, the children and wards of such parents also need to be beneficiaries of such loans to assist them to meet the education needs of the children.
According to him, the inability of the public universities to admit all qualified candidates into the system yearly, and majorly the crises and infractions leading to incessant strikes and closure of public institutions, particularly universities, made the intervention of private universities inevitable for some parents.
“My findings in some leading private universities in the country show that 40 per cent of the students are from average or middle level income earners, like lecturers and civil servants,” he stated.
Contrary to the position of the government on the beneficiaries of the student loan, Dasylva said for instance, there are super-rich parents and guardians whose children and wards are in public universities that may need the loan.
Similarly, he added that there are children of very rich or wellto-do parents in private universities who may also not need the loan facility.
Towards this end, the Federal Government criteria and requirement for accessing the loan should not have anything to do with public or private universities, but rather, it should be based and determined by the parents’ annual income, if it is low income earner, or wage earners, or pettytrading, and among other things their children should qualify to access the loan either in public or private universities.
That is how students’ statuses are determined in places such as the United States of America and other climes, where students do not pay school fees on account of their parents’ very low income status.
