Akintunde Sawyerr, Managing Director of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND, has denied charges of financial mismanagement within the organization, stating that there is no evidence to substantiate such claims.
In an interview with ARISE NEWS on Monday, Sawyerr stated that NELFUND required capital to grant student loans and related the scheme’s inception to the federal government’s choice to allocate funds toward social programs.
“There is no evidence of any financial misappropriation by NELFUND. The reality of it is that in order for people to take a loan, there has to be some capital they can draw on.
“The link is that the president, His Excellency President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has removed the subsidy on the one hand and is reassigning the funds that would ordinarily have gone to the top 1% of the 1% and pushing them into welfarist programs, of which NELFUND is one,” Sawyerr said.
He also defended the transparency of NELFUND’s financial disbursement procedure, contesting the scheme’s status as opaque.
Sawyer stated that payments to institutions and students were made electronically and traceable and that NELFUND had recently given more than N1 billion to the University of Ibadan, with upkeep payments delivered straight to beneficiaries’ bank accounts.
“Again, concluding that 57% of people didn’t find it to the level of transparency that they would like, describing that as opaque, I think is a little bit extreme. But let’s go back and try to understand where we’re coming from with this.
“The University of Ibadan students, before NELFUND, probably had a very high dropout rate because they just didn’t have access to capital to go to school.
“Now, the president introduced NELFUND; we paid, I believe, over a billion naira to the University of Ibadan recently. And those funds are transferred directly to the institution. So, where is the opacity in that?
“We transferred the funds directly to the institution and asked the institution to give the students access to classes. We’ve also paid upkeep to the students directly,” he said.
Sawyerr stated that the transfers could be traced electronically from the Central Bank of Nigeria to institutions or directly to students.
“Now, in those two actions, the transfers of money are done electronically. It’s entirely traceable.
“The money leaves the Central Bank of Nigeria and goes either to the institution, the University of Ibadan, or, in the case of upkeep, goes directly to the students in their bank accounts.
“So, I’m struggling to understand where the lack of transparency is. It sounds a little bit like mischief to me. But again, I’d need to interrogate this research that was done,” he said.
Regarding concerns about the fairness of beneficiary selection, Sawyerr stated that NELFUND’s application procedure was totally electronic and designed to be unbiased.
“We receive applications electronically. The system doesn’t recognize whether you’re male or female, whether you’re Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Fulani, Ibibio, or Ogoja.
“As long as you have an NIN, it’s in your favor because it means you’re Nigerian. If you have a JAMB registration number, it means that you’re properly qualified to access the tertiary institution that we deal with,” Sawyerr said.
He also stated that eligibility was based on requirements including admission details and a bank account.
“If you’ve got a matriculation number or registration number, it means that you’ve been given admission. If you’ve got a bank account—because we don’t do cash, everything goes through the system—again, it means you qualify, and you’ve got admission to a proper institution,” he said.
“From our perspective, it’s completely agnostic as far as how people are chosen or concerned. It doesn’t care. The system doesn’t care whether you’re friends with the managing director or in-laws with the executive director. It doesn’t care,” Sawyerr added.
