Lanre Laoshe, a former house of representatives member, has
repaid his student loan debt incurred between 1976 and 1979 to the Nigerian
Education Loan Fund (NELFund).
NELFund, in a statement on Tuesday, said Laoshe repaid a
debt of N1,200 from Nigeria’s past student loan regime with N3,189,217.
Loashe served at the lower legislative chamber between June
2007 and October 2007 with Patricia Etteh as the house speaker.
Nigeria’s first attempt at a student loan scheme came in
1972 with Decree No. 25 creating the Nigerian Students Loans Board (NSLB).
By 1991, the NSLB had awarded loans amounting to about N46
million, of which only N6 million (13 percent) was recovered.
Joseph Chuta, former executive secretary of the board, had
said the defaulters exploited loopholes in the decree to evade responsibility.
He had said NSLB struggled to enforce repayment because of
the widespread perception that the loan scheme was a “national cake”.
Due to this, Decree No. 12 of 1988 was promulgated to
decentralise the process of award and loan recovery by establishing zonal
offices.
However, the administrative changes yielded little results
as no evidence showed the loan scheme functioned any better in recovery.
Laoshe, who benefitted from this defunct loan regime, said
he obtained a table of average annual exchange rates from 1972 to 1985 from the
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to determine the 2024 equivalent of N1,200 from
the late 1970s.
NELFund said the table indicated that, in 1979, the NGN-USD
exchange rate was N0.596/$1, meaning that N1,200 was $2,013.42 in 1979.
Using the current exchange rate of N1,583.98/$1, NELFund
said Laoshe calculated that an equivalent repayment today is N3,189,217.
The fund confirmed that the ex-lawmaker issued a Polaris
Bank Plc bank draft (No. 14670909) for this amount to repay his loan debt.
Nasir Ayitogo, NELFund’s director of corporate
communications, described Laoshe’s repayment as an “act of goodwill and
integrity”.
The federal government enacted the current regime of the
student loan scheme in April 2024 with NELFund to govern it.
NELFUND opened its application portal on May 24, at which
time a pilot phase to serve federal tertiary institutions began.
Repayment, it said, begins two years after a beneficiary
completes their National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) run if they are employed.
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