When Ibrahim Bukar Tijjani got to university, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund paid his tuition from 300 level through graduation and gave him N20,000 a month for upkeep. Now he is asking the country to think bigger, and earlier, about who the fund should reach.
Tijjani said he applied with his NIN and matric number and was approved, describing the process as smooth and digital, and he argued that Nigeria should build a Basic Education Support Fund on the same model. He wants it to work without interest, with NIN and BVN verification, and to cover approved levies, uniforms and textbooks in public schools across the 774 local government areas.
The appeal lands at a moment when NELFUND has already become one of the country’s largest education interventions since it was signed into law on 3 April 2024. The fund has disbursed over N206 billion to 1.16 million students in public tertiary institutions, including N128.8 billion sent directly to institutions for tuition and N77.4 billion paid to students as upkeep.
The vice chancellor of Sokoto State University said the scheme has “accorded opportunity to less privileged families” and eased financial pressure on students and parents. For families that had never imagined a child could make it through university, the program has changed the math of higher education.
But Tijjani said that is also the limit of the current system. He argued that many children are permanently locked out of university and even NELFUND because they do not have SSCE, and that the country’s education financing crisis begins long before a student reaches a lecture hall.
That is why he said the issue cannot stop at tertiary education. Nigeria still has over 10.5 million out-of-school children, a number that makes the gap in basic education more urgent than any debate about university loans. In Tijjani’s view, the state should be helping parents meet the first costs that keep children in school, not only the costs that arrive after years of exclusion have already taken hold.
He said the proposed fund should handle the kind of charges that push poor families out of the classroom, including a N3,000 PTA levy, uniforms and textbooks. His argument is that a child should not have to wait until adulthood, or until university admission, before public financing begins to work for them.
There is still a hard limit in the current design. NELFUND serves public tertiary students, not primary or secondary pupils, so the people most exposed to dropout risk are outside its reach. Tijjani’s case is both proof that the model can work and a warning that it reaches too late for millions of children.
For him, the question is no longer whether the system can be built. It already has been. The real issue is whether Nigeria is willing to use it at the stage when keeping a child in school is still possible.
