Would you continue the student loan scheme, and would it reach students without collateral?

Q30: Many intelligent students cannot afford university or even remain in school because their families are poor. What financial support will your government provide? Answer: My administration will provide non-repayable scholarships, grants, and bursaries instead of forcing students into debt, while forgiving existing student loan obligations and directly reducing university tuition costs for low-income families.

It is inconceivable that the Federal Government will lead the country to take a loan of $3.3b with an interest rate that is not more than 12 per cent, but with estimated repayment amounting to $12bn. That is a humongous differential of about $7b between what is in the details of the deal on paper and what indeed is the reality. There are questions to be answered on the integrity of this deal, and we earnestly request the Federal Government to talk directly on these cloudy details behind the deal. We therefore demand, on behalf of the ordinary people of Nigeria, that the Federal Government provides answers to the following questions. 1. Has the Federal Government accessed the loan? 2. Is the loan in the government’s borrowing plan as approved by the National Assembly? 3. Who are the parties to the loan, and what specific roles are they expected to play? 4. What are the conditions to the loan, including tenor, repayment terms, the collateral, and the interest rate? 5. And, lastly, why register an SPV in the Bahamas knowing the recent scandal of the country’s notoriety for warehousing unclean assets?

I have been well briefed on how Nigerian students under the Bilateral Education Agreement (BEA) have been abandoned abroad. The BEA is a scholarship scheme that began in 1993 and was revitalised in 1999. It allows Nigerian students to pursue undergraduate and postgraduate studies in various countries through agreements between Nigeria and those nations. However, under the @officialABAT administration, the BEA scholarship programme, a bridge between Nigeria and the world, has been quietly discontinued without notice to the parents/wards of the students and without any consideration for their education. I am informed that what was initially described as a temporary five-year suspension soon metamorphosed into outright abandonment, leaving about 1,600 young Nigerians stranded abroad with empty pockets and fading hope. Their pleas are simple and desperate: pay the stipends owed, now more than $6,000 per student. Yet from the corridors of power came a cold, technocratic explanation: scarce public funds must be managed “responsibly,” and money meant to keep these students alive abroad should instead be redirected home. In that reasoning, the humans behind the figures dissolved into abstractions, and duty was sacrificed on the altar of convenience.

The cruelty of the moment was sharpened by timing and tone. After months of cries from students and parents over unpaid allowances, the authorities announced the suspension with a levity that stunned those already on the brink. Between September and December 2023, the students were not paid, and in 2024, stipends were slashed by 56 per cent, from $500 to $220 a month, before stopping altogether. There was no payment throughout the whole of 2025. I gathered that hunger, rent arrears, and shame have become the daily companions of the beneficiary students. In Morocco, one student did not survive the ordeal, dying in November last year and turning quiet suffering into public grief. Parents and scholars poured into the streets of Abuja, protesting before the Ministries of Education and Finance, their placards heavy with sorrow and rage, their questions unanswered. Then came the final wound: defiance dressed as policy. In a press statement, the minister declared that any student “fed up” could be financed to return home, as though abandoning years of study and shattered dreams were a minor administrative detail. To anxious parents, it sounded like expulsion by neglect, Nigeria casting off its brightest children and leaving them to become objects of pity among peers from African countries that honour their obligations.

The good news for Nigerian students is that Atiku has reviewed the current student-loan policy and believes education should not begin with a mountain of debt hanging over a young Nigerian’s future. His approach will reduce the underlying cost of education and, after review, provide forgiveness for qualifying student debts so that young Nigerians can graduate with hope rather than repayment burdens. Education should open doors, not mortgage the future. A student loan is not a scholarship. It is a liability. The proper test of an education policy is whether ordinary families can educate their children without being pushed into debt merely to keep them in school. When students increasingly require loans because the underlying cost of education has become prohibitive, government should not parade the loan itself as evidence that the system is working. And your attempt to frighten students and workers by claiming that Atiku’s targeted and capped production support will somehow destroy NELFUND, reduce salaries or reverse the minimum wage is a fallacious claim without a ledger behind it. If your government has the arithmetic, Bola, publish it. Show Nigerians, line by line, how a transparently budgeted subsidy tied to Nigerian crude and domestic refining suddenly empties NELFUND or workers’ pay packets.

You speak of young Nigerians building unicorns. I see their talent wherever I go. I see young people learning new skills, making things and looking for a chance to serve their country. They first need work that pays enough to get them through the month. Ambition is abundant in Nigeria. What is scarce is the chance to turn it into a living. And please do not describe every new loan as an opportunity. A student loan does not make education affordable when fees are rising. Under your watch, some institutions have raised fees by more than 400 per cent, and your answer is to offer students loans to pay them. Consumer credit does not make a worker prosperous if repayment takes another bite out of a wage already too small to live on. Tell Nigerians what these programmes have delivered, who has benefited and what they must pay back. The confusion extends to your budgets. You have just signed an extension keeping the 2025 budget in operation until the last day of 2026. The 2026 budget exists alongside it. Soon, your government will ask Nigerians to examine a 2027 budget. How many budgets must be open at once before you can tell the country what was funded, what was completed and what remains unpaid? A budget should be a timetable for delivery, not a ball passed from one year to the next.