The Managing Director of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), Akintunde Sawyerr, has rejected suggestions that the Tinubu administration is using the student loan scheme to favour party loyalists; he described the allegation as “completely ridiculous.”
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme, Sawyerr said the electronic application process makes such manipulation impossible, since it requires only a student’s name and matriculation number and carries no mechanism for detecting political affiliation.
“I have not heard this allegation, but I can tell you that it’s a completely ridiculous idea that the administration of Bola Tinubu is focused on trying to fund people who support the party,” he said.
He pointed out that many beneficiaries are first-time voters or not yet eligible to vote at all, and that most are not affiliated with any political party.
The NELFUND chief executive questioned how such screening would even work in practice.
“How, in any event, do we determine who is a party member and who isn’t? Even if you are running a manual process, how do you do that? You can’t,” he said.
He added that the entire application must be done online and hinges on public institution enrolment rather than personal connections.
Sawyerr’s remarks come against a backdrop of growing scrutiny of the fund, which administers interest-free loans covering institutional fees and monthly upkeep for eligible students in public tertiary institutions.
He acknowledged that demand for the loans had been “overwhelming,” a sign of how central the scheme has become to financing higher education since its introduction under the current administration.
Beyond political neutrality, the NELFUND boss extended his defence to religious and ethnic considerations; it insisted that the system was built to be blind to such factors.
“We have a system that is focused on people who are Nigerians and meet the standard. The system doesn’t recognise your gender. There is no bias in the system at the front end or the back end,” he explained.
He was equally emphatic on matters of faith and tribe.
“This is a system that doesn’t care whether you are of one tribe or the other. This system does not have a view or an opinion on whether you are a Christian, a Muslim, or an African traditional religionist; it doesn’t want to know,” Sawyerr said.
New Daily Prime earlier reported that NELFUND publicly labelled as “fake news” a circulating image alleging that President Tinubu had announced life imprisonment for graduates who default on their loan repayments. The rapid denial suggests the agency continuously has to fight misinformation alongside managing the practical demands of a scheme still finding its footing.
Taken together, Sawyerr’s appearance reads less as a routine defence and more as an attempt to draw a firm line under a scheme that has, since its rollout, attracted both high demand and persistent scepticism about how fairly it is administered.
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