With the SLF therefore, there is the prospect of an increased flow of funding into the higher education system in ways that make for an equitable infusion that trumps the conventional financing through scholarship, bursaries and grants that are often crippled by fiscal deficit, bureaucratic corruption and acute politicisation of the schemes.
This is not to say that policies do not fail in their design stage too. And this is where all stakeholders in this Act must really pay attention to ensure that the trajectory of the policy, from design and formulation to implementation, is not fatally flawed as to render it useless. One key issue concerns the administrative model for the SLF.
The agency will be saddled with the responsibility of thinking through and to thoroughly dimension the challenges embedded in the conditions for and the operational guidelines and procedures guiding its disbursement, repayment terms for the loans, assistance from and relationship with commercial banks, and other issues that will make for a seamless administration.
The management of the loan-fund and the dynamics of its administration will be crucial matters to beware of. Nigeria’s unfortunate statistics of youth unemployment that will play a critical role in how the framework of repayment will play out. There is also the important issue of those who have benefitted from the loans not being able to pay back because they are only able to get low-paying jobs, or struggling in the informal sector to make ends meet.
That the SLF has now become a reform reality, and is in the process of being implemented, is a significant development, according to my reform intuition. Indeed, I am excited that the fundamental crisis of funding higher education in Nigeria is getting attention from a government that wants to tackle the development agenda from the perspective of facilitating human capital development.