People object to student loans for many useful reasons, but this initiative does not yet look like it will ensnare the destinies of the students who take them. Whether it will be properly managed is another argument altogether.
Where things get interesting is the income requirement. To access the loan, the student or their family must not make more than a N500, 000 income per annum. For a law that will supposedly provide “easy access to higher education…for all Nigerians,” this is a curious characterisation of who belongs to the indigent class.
Nigeria’s poverty rate has typically been measured through dollar figures. Presently, the official and international measure of poverty rate is counted as living on less than $1.90 daily. When the National Bureau of Statistics launched the results of the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index Survey that found that 63 per cent of persons living within Nigeria are multidimensionally poor, they did not mark their assessment of poverty through income level. They used other descriptive means.
While a broad category of Nigerians will fall under the <N500, 000 mark, I still wonder at the image of the “ideal” low-income family that exists in the mind of the bill drafters and the government officials who pushed into a law. If such a family has a car, the average monthly sum they are not supposed to exceed is less than the costs of filling up the petrol tank under the new fuel pricing regime.
In these very challenging economic times, earning even N5m annually does not take most families out of the indigent zone. Statistically, the average Nigerian spends more than 90 per cent of their income on food alone. Beyond eating, an average family in Nigeria also must buy diesel for their generator in addition to their paying for electricity, healthcare, security, education, and generally pick the slack in all areas where the government is lacking.
Even the Nigerian government that pays a N30,000 minimum wage has serially admitted that the sum gives people meager purchasing power. By setting income qualifications for student loans at N500,000 or less, the government shows how incoherently it conceives of the idea of indigence. While they accept, on the one hand, that majority of Nigerians are impoverished and their earnings cannot sustain them, their idea of indigence on the other hand is inchoate.
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