Students loan scheme will keep beneficiaries in permanent debt -ASUU
The proposed education loan plan, according to the Academic Staff Union of Universities, will leave students perpetually in debt.
ASUU released a statement on Thursday following its National Executive Council meeting at Niger Delta University in Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State. In the statement, the union expressed surprise at the information it had learned about the administration led by Bola Tinubu's broken promises to address the persistent problems that led the union to decide to go on a nationwide strike that would last from February to October 2022.
Nigeria's governments have consistently shown lip service to the agreements they signed with the union, which has unintentionally caused the union to become resolute in using industrial action to defend its rights.
Regretfully, the government has not carried out some of these agreements, such as the release of Earned Academic Allowance, the unprogressive renegotiation of the 2009 ASUU-FGN agreement, the removal from the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System, revitalization funds, and withheld salaries.
However, the Students Loan Scheme, which is being pushed by global money lending organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, would deprive public universities of funding, according to ASUU.
"For the avoidance of doubt, the ASUU NEC reiterated its rejection of the Students Loan Scheme, which is being promoted by international money lending agencies such as the World Bank and IMF," the statement stated.
Nigerians need to understand that the plan is a ruse to redirect funds intended for public universities into other projects and to starve them of funding into private universities owned by politically exposed individuals and their friends.
"The Student Loan Scheme will mortgage the entire university system and keep our promising students forever indebted," the NC further noted.
"There is no guarantee that the scheme will succeed in Nigeria, where unbridled corruption, nepotism, and other unsavoury tendencies conspired to kill the Education Bank project after over five years of its existence. If it could fail in some better-managed economies, that is."
However, ASUU recommended that grants and scholarships be made available to students and that the university system should reinstate the Needs-Based Budgeting System for increased efficiency if the state and federal governments genuinely wished to invest in the lives of Nigerian students.
In a statement, ASUU National President Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke stated that the union disapproved of the significant fee increase in schools, saying funds diverted from the government’s treasuries should be used to fund universities.
"NEC condemns in its entirety the wave of fee hikes across our campuses without input from the victims," the statement said.
"Daily scandalous reports of enormous sums of money being syphoned off from state and federal government treasuries strengthen our conviction that the nation's resources could sustain government-funded university education—without placing undue pressure on parents, as is currently the case."
It explained that many universities would have been brought back to a level where they could draw in international students and establish themselves as leaders in innovative and game-changing research if the Federal Government had stuck to the terms of the MoU 2013, which allocated N1.3t over the course of six years.
The Federal Government's response to a similar challenge in 2012 gave rise to the aggregate sum of N1.3 trillion, which the Government has since abrogated. "We challenge the Tinubu administration to urgently initiate moves to conduct another needs assessment exercise to empirically verify our call for massive intervention in our public universities," the statement said.
