By Olukorede Yishau
I RETURN, once again, to a familiar terrain. I didn’t know I will stage a return so soon, but Senator Dino Melaye has left me with no choice. He was a guest on this space some weeks ago.
He is back, like they say in Gen Z lingo, with a banger. Without blinking and while beating his chest, yet something tells me he knows he was spewing rubbish, he has shown his unbeatable leading position among Nigerian politicians who can make you wonder whether numbers have personally offended them.
Melaye, no doubt, has developed a particularly complicated relationship with figures. If you give him a billion, he may find a thousand. If you give him a thousand, by the time he is done talking, you may be wondering where the other 999 is.
His latest problem with mathematics is courtesy of the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND).
Melaye is attacking the student loan scheme. In a video I saw on Monday, he asked: “Which government school takes N20,000 as annual school fees?” He then asked why President Bola Tinubu would claim to be paying students’ school fees when “he’s giving them only N20,000.”
The statement has everything a political soundbite needs: Tinubu, students, NELFUND, corruption, ₦20,000 and outrage. But, there is one big problem: While the ₦20,000 is real, it is not what Melaye says it is.
NELFUND does provide an upkeep allowance of ₦20,000 to eligible students. The important word here is upkeep. It does not cover the entire student loan. The tuition fee is different.
NELFUND’s website explains that the student loan covers institutional charges and upkeep and there are clips of beneficiaries on the social media that confirm this. After an application is verified, institutional charges are paid to the student’s institution while the upkeep component is paid into the student’s bank account. Its terms and conditions also separately identify institutional fees and upkeep as components of the loan.
So, when Melaye asks which government school takes ₦20,000 as annual fees, he has apparently constructed an argument against something NELFUND is not saying, and I believe he knows that he is simply playing politics with a matter when there is an army of beneficiaries to disprove.
We don’t need Melaye to tell Nigerian students that ₦20,000 is not enough to pay their annual tuition. The students already know, their parents know, their lecturers know, the market woman selling rice to them knows, and the bus driver transporting them to campus knows. The student, who receives the ₦20,000, knows that it is an upkeep allowance, not a magic eraser for every bill attached to university life.
The more interesting question is why a politician would take the upkeep figure and present it as the entire intervention. And without blinking an eye.
Perhaps the answer is in the numbers Melaye deliberately, in my opinion, did not mention. As of September 3, 2026, NELFUND’s latest published disbursement figures showed that ₦355.87 billion had been disbursed since the student loan portal was launched in May 2024. The amount was paid directly to tertiary institutions in the country. Of that amount, ₦192.89 billion had gone directly to 319 beneficiary institutions as institutional fees, while ₦162.98 billion had been disbursed as upkeep allowances to students. About 1.66 million applications, according to NELFUND, had been processed.
So, ₦192.89 billion paid to institutions is not ₦20,000 handed to students.
Indeed, by July, NELFUND’s cumulative disbursement had already reached ₦303.91 billion, with ₦190.06 billion paid as institutional fees and ₦113.85 billion for upkeep. More than 1.64 million students were then beneficiaries.
NELFUND is not beyond criticism. Far from it. In my view, a monthly ₦20,000 upkeep allowance is a perfectly legitimate subject for criticism. Anybody who knows about the sharp rise in the cost of food, transportation, accommodation and educational materials in Nigeria can ask whether ₦20,000 is adequate. Students can complain about delayed payments, parents can ask whether the scheme is reaching the people who need it most and Nigerians can demand transparency over the money released and the students who receive it.
As a matter of fact, there have been complaints about delays and inconsistencies in upkeep payments. In March 2026, Vanguard reported that students were raising concerns over the timing of upkeep payments, even while reporting that NELFUND had disbursed more than ₦206 billion to over 1.16 million beneficiaries, including ₦128.84 billion in institutional fees and ₦77.45 billion in upkeep.
Those are genuine concerns.
But to say “N20,000 is too little” is an entirely different argument from “NELFUND only pays ₦20,000 per student.” The first is a policy criticism, but the second requires ignoring the more significant numbers. And this is where Melaye’s history with facts becomes relevant, not as a personal attack but as a reason to examine his claims carefully.
In 2023, TheCable fact-checked a video he shared showing alleged political thugs arrested in Lagos. The video turned out to have been published in May 2022 and concerned an incident in Iseyin, Oyo State. TheCable’s verdict was that the video was “misleading.”
That same election season, the Centre for Democracy and Development’s Election War Room found false a claim by Melaye that a video showed a Lagos APC “killer squad” being arrested on election day. The video actually showed an incident in Iseyin during an APC primary in Oyo State in 2022.
In September 2023, Africa Check examined another claim associated with Melaye, this time concerning uranium deposits in Kogi State. Its conclusion was that there was no evidence for the claim that Kogi had Nigeria’s largest uranium deposits. Then in April 2024, TheCable examined another Melaye post claiming that the Federal Government had scrapped the NTA, FRCN, ICPC, NCDC, NCC and other agencies. The fact-check found the claim misleading. The government’s proposal involved mergers, consolidation and restructuring, not the wholesale scrapping presented in his post.
There is a pattern here worth noticing. It is not that everything Melaye says is false. It is that some of his most attention-grabbing claims have required substantial correction or context after the fact.
That should make Nigerians particularly careful when he produces another spectacular number. The NELFUND matter is a perfect example.
If Melaye wants to say ₦20,000 is inadequate, let him say it. If he wants to argue that the student loan programme is poorly administered, let him bring evidence. If he believes corruption exists within NELFUND, let him produce the documents and identify the transactions. If he wants to challenge the government’s claim that the programme is helping students, let him examine beneficiary numbers, institutional payments, repayment arrangements and implementation failures.
Those would be serious arguments. But reducing ₦355.87 billion in recorded disbursements to ₦20,000 per student is not serious mathematics, but political arithmetic and political arithmetic is a strange discipline in which the number you want to trumpet becomes the only number that exists. The Nigerian student deserves better. The student struggling to pay rent deserves the truth. The parent borrowing money to keep a child in school deserves the truth. The taxpayer funding the programme deserves the truth and even the government deserves to be criticised with the correct figures.
My final take: NELFUND is not perfect. The scheme needs more money, faster payments and stronger accountability. But if we are going to put NELFUND on trial, let us do so with the whole evidence, especially in Nigerian politics, where, a lot of the time, the deliberately omitted number tells the real story.
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NELFUND is not perfect. The scheme needs more money, faster payments and stronger accountability. But if we are going to put NELFUND on trial, let us do so with the whole evidence, especially in Nigerian politics, where, a lot of the time, the deliberately-omitted number tells the real story.
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