NELFUND To Stop Students Collecting Loans While Parents Pay Fees

NELFUND adds parent verification, wallet-based fee payments, and zonal re-education as it tightens the student loan scheme.

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund says it will clamp down on students who draw on the government’s loan scheme for tuition while their parents continue to pay the same fees, and plans to hand parents a way to check for themselves whether the school has been paid.

Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr announced the move at a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, describing what he called double-dipping as unacceptable. “This comment is based on our recognition that there are so many students out there who are double-dipping. They are taking from the NELFUND and still stressing their parents,” he said. “We are going to put an end to that.”

Under the arrangement reported, parents would be able to confirm that their child’s institutional charges were settled through the scheme without being shown the actual sum involved.

The design is deliberately narrow. It establishes a fact, whether the school was paid, without turning the loan into a family negotiation about amount.

“They are taking from the NELFUND and still stressing their parents…We are going to put an end to that.”- Managing Director AKINTUNDE SAWYERR

The fund is also betting that part of the problem is comprehension rather than dishonesty. Sawyerr said NELFUND will run re-education workshops across the country’s six geopolitical zones, targeting students, parents, and tertiary institutions, and going beyond its usual awareness campaigns. “We can easily do a press release and say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’ But if we don’t educate the institutions, if we don’t educate the students, everybody will still be running behind,” he said. He added that journalists may be invited to observe some of the engagements.

On the mechanics, Executive Director Mustapha Iyal said institutional fees are paid through an arrangement tied to each student’s application ID and an attached wallet, not a conventional bank account. “To be clear, we don’t use account numbers. We use their application ID and wallet number,” he said.

Upkeep allowances move separately into students’ personal accounts through external channels such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack, because the fund is not a bank and cannot open accounts for beneficiaries; he noted that those channels can introduce delays depending on the receiving institution.

Iyal put the pilot at about 400,000 students, with roughly 20,000 additional students recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing, and said the system processes transactions for nearly 5,000 students daily.

The through-line is a shift in the scheme’s centre of gravity: from expanding access to policing what happens after access is granted.