Students Loan: NANS Wants Lecturers, Others Removed From Committee

President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) Umar Barambu has said they want inclusion of past national leaders of the association and exclusion of lecturers and lawyers.

He disclosed this to State House correspondents yesterday after they met with President Bola Tinubu  at the Presidential Villa.

Recall that Tinubu on Monday signed the Students Loan Bill into law, in fulfilment of one of his promises to liberalise funding of education in the country.

The NANS president said the new Act will alleviate the plight of Nigerian students and afford them the opportunity to study with fewer difficulties.

Speaking on the clause of the Act they are not comfortable with, the NANS President said: “We have outlined the clauses that we are not too comfortable with. And part of them is the issue of that board that we mentioned to the president, in which we said at least students’ representatives should be captured and there are some organisations that they put there, which to us, they don’t need to be there. We gave him an example, most especially the Nigerian Bar Association, ASUU. ASUU has their own microfinance bank running their own affairs without students on their board. So I don’t think it’s wise for us to allow them to be inside our own board because it is purely students. We are the major stakeholders of that bank. So, I don’t think allowing them to be there is good. Not only them, we mentioned a lot of people that they should remove and put more into a student-oriented organisation.”

According to the Act, the committee consists of the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria as the Chairman; the Secretary of the Fund who shall be appointed by the Chairman; the minister responsible for education; the Chairman, National Universities Commission; a representative of Vice-Chancellors forum of all Nigeria Universities; a representative of the Rectors forums of all Nigerian Polytechnics and Provosts’ Forum of all Colleges of Education in Nigeria; the minister responsible for finance or his representative and the Auditor-General for the Federation.

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Others are a representative of the Nigeria Labour Congress, a representative of the Nigerian Bar Association and a representative of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).