Contrary to earlier speculations that the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) had uncovered fraud in the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND, the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa on Wednesday clarified that no fraud was uncovered saying that the issue was that of timelines and efficiency of disbursement and notification processes.
The commission had said its preliminary findings revealed that while the Federal Government released N100 billion for the scheme, only N28.8 billion was disbursed to students, leaving N71.2b unaccounted for.
But Alausa while speaking to journalists at the end of a meeting with Vice Chancellors, officials of the National Universities Commission, Nigerian Education Loan Fund and the Federal Ministry of Education in Abuja, faulted the ICPC' s earlier statement noting that the commission had equally retracted that position..
“Let me start by saying that there is no fraud in NELFUND. ICPC reported that the information was not correct. There is no fraud in NELFUND; what we have are issues that have to do with the timeline.
The ICPC reported some information that was not correct about the large amount of money being misappropriated from their funds. The chairman of ICPC has since come out to retract that statement.
“The current processes are working, but we are working to better the system we have now. The aim is to serve both NELFUND and our citizens more efficiently, and align with the broader agenda of the current administration,” the minister said.
As parts of efforts to address these issues, the minister announced the setting up of a committee comprising representatives from NELFUND, the Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and other key university officials.
He said the task before the committee is to standardise the nomenclature for student fees and charges across universities in the country.
According to the Minister, while the actual fee amounts may varies depending on eachinstitution, all universities are to adopt uniform terminology to ensure transparency and accountability.
He assured that after the submission by the committee, the finalised guidelines for standardising fee payments across tertiary institutions nationwide will be made public.
“The committee will determine and publish standard timelines for when NELFUND will disburse funds and when universities must notify students.
“Universities will disclose service charges upfront to avoid misunderstandings in refunded amounts. The second term of reference that we decided that this committee will work on is to come up with timelines of when NELFUND will pay the fees to the universities.
"The third is we need to now decide on timelines on when universities will notify students when they are getting the money from NELFund and timelines on when they would also pay a refund to students.
"The fourth term of reference is the way the universities will notify students, they have to decide, we have to notify them by email, notify them by SMS or call them, a mixture of some of those ways of notification. I think we have also given them latitude to come up with any other thing in improving the processes that we are currently in now.
"The committee has three weeks to submit its report to myself and the members of the States, and in the next four weeks we will finalise new guidelines on how this entire process will work from NELFUND and from the universities. We will release that to the universities and we will release that finalised guidelines to(the public Those are the things we covered this morning," the minister stated.