The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has demanded that the just-signed Students’ Loan Bill be renamed.
ASUU President, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke made the demand on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme.
Osodeke requested that President Bola Tinubu make amendments to the bill and call it a grant for indigent students.
While the law provided for interest-free loans to poor Nigerian students, the ASUU President has stated that the loan was impracticable and “not sustainable.”
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The ASUU President cited a large number of public university students in Nigeria, which exceeded one million, as a reason why the loan cannot adequately cater to students’ tuition.
He said:
“This would have been better if we are giving it to those set of students who are very poor, it should be called a grant, not a loan.
“It should be called a grant since it is coming from the Federation Account and not that (after) these people have access it and when they are graduating, they have heavy loads behind them and within two years, if they don’t pay, they go to jail. That’s why we’re talking about collective bargaining, you have views from all the sides.
“The idea of student loan came in 1972 and it was in a bank established. People who took loans never paid, you can go and investigate. In 1994, 1993, the military enacted Decree 50 also set up a Students’ Loan Board. The National Assembly domesticated it in 2004 and within a year, it went off. The money disappeared. We want to see how this one will be different.”
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He also spoke about the conditions for the loan describing them as “not practicable.”
Osodeke stressed that more than 90 per cent of students won’t meet the “stringent requirements” to access and repay the loan.
He said:
“We, as a union also did research of countries all over the world, of people who have benefited from this loan, they were committing suicide.
“Recently, (President Joe) Biden is trying to pay back the bank loans of some who borrowed in the US.
“It is better to look for alternative means of funding education than to encumbering students whose parents earn N30,000 a month with a loan.”
