Mustapha Iyal, the executive director of operations at the Nigeria Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), says all students owed arrears under the scheme will soon receive their payments.
Speaking in a recent interview on Arise News, Iyal clarified that over 11,000 students are experiencing the delay, totalling about N927.98 million.
He said the delay was caused by technical and operational issues, adding that plans are on for an expansion in the 2026–2027 academic session.
Iyal said the backlog of applicants increased due to various issues, including the application process or students’ unseriousness.
“Majorly, the issue of that comes mostly from the application process. The student has been in a rush to apply, to just do a test. Some of them have submitted the wrong account number. Some of them are using duplicate accounts to just apply,” he said.
“Some of them may have wrong numbers, but we have their right BVN. We have their right matric and NIN. So, we reach out to the institutions and send them this list and say, ‘Kindly call your student in. Let them come and update their records.
“Presently, we have almost 50 percent of records updated, and by next week, we are going to start paying out all this backlog because it is a loan. And we cannot say, because they have not got it, that we will just wipe it.”
Iyal explained that the process is fully digitalised and integrates with institutional databases.
“We have a website; that’s nelfund.gov.ng. When the student goes to that website, there is a button that says Apply Now. When they click apply now, it takes them to a page where they are asked which institutions they are from,” he added.
“But all the institutions that sent us data – presently we have about almost 326 institutions that sent us data for the last session. But for this session, we have about 260 institutions that sent us updated data.
“So, when the student goes into the portal and is asked to apply for the NELFund, we next ask him for his matriculation number. We then check the institution’s database because we are connected to their database.”
Iyal also revealed that over 200 institutions have submitted applications to join the scheme.
Since its inception, NELFund has disbursed N161.97 billion and received over 1.36 million applications, benefiting 864,798 students.
