Pitfalls of Students Loan Act

There has been a myriad of negative reactions to the Students’ Loan Act since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the bill into law. Nigeria’s government has indicated that the main objective of the act is designed to facilitate acquisition of higher education for young Nigerians through with interest-free loans.          

Days after the approval of the act, the president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), said, “The conditions for the loans are impracticable and more than 90 per cent of Nigerian students will not be able to meet the stringent requirements to access and repay the loans.”

ASUU also alleged that the law is a surreptitious attempt to remove the entire subsidy from tertiary education.

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) also protested against the act and pointed out that it would plunge young Nigerians further into poverty and social vices.

I support both ASUU and HURIWA’s views because with those extreme conditions of the act millions of our sons and daughters coming from low income families will never have access to higher education in the country, which will undoubtedly rub salt into the wound of social exclusion, abject poverty and terrorism.  

It is evident that higher education contributes significantly to poverty reduction by increasing a number of skilled graduates in the labour force. It is also a powerful weapon of combating the poverty circle for lifting millions of young people out of poverty in their future lives.

Now that Nigeria’s secondary school graduates coming from low income settings will definitely lose that entrepreneurial education known as the Tertiary Institutions Entrepreneurship Scheme (TIES), introduced in the curriculum of the country’s tertiary institutions and designed to provide undergraduates and graduates with unprecedented contemporary culture of embracing entrepreneurial skills for self-employment in the absence of white collar jobs after graduation. A very important question here is, did Nigeria’s authorities think deeply of what will happen to the country’s future security as long as millions of higher education seekers who belong to low income families are incapable of having access to tertiary education on account of either their failure to meet those draconian conditions imposed by the act or exorbitant tuition fees when the suspected removal of education subsidy becomes a reality?

In these days when the country makes every effort to grapple with unethical conducts and waves of social vices such as drug abuse, cultism, thuggery, prostitution, phone-snatching and kidnapping for ransom that keep swallowing Nigerian youths and teenagers as a result of either lack of opportunity to be admitted into tertiary institutions or empowerment to be self-reliant, it is very important for Nigerian authorities, as long as they are truly servant leaders, to ensure that youths get  opportunity for obtaining higher education without strict conditions and make them good and productive citizens before they turn into the biggest adversaries to their country.

Beyond doubt, those intense conditions for having access to the students’ loans will cripple the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) that aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. The actualisation of this goal will create a peaceful, prosperous and well-built nation.

Nigerian authorities should not allow its growing capitalist economy to take hold of its public tertiary institutions because the reality is that it will totally destroy them. They should also ensure accessibility of inclusive education by withdrawing inequitable conditions from that act preventing millions of young men and women of low income settings from acquiring the loans. The importance of an investment and grant in Nigeria’s higher education cannot be underestimated towards acquiring skills and training that will reduce poverty, greatest job security and stable future security for the country.

Mustapha Baba Azare, Bauchi State – [email protected]