EXTRA: Ex-lawmaker Lanre Laoshe repays student loan debt of 1970s to NELFund

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.