The Federal Ministry of Education has pushed back hard against reports that the Minister of Education personally delayed the resumption of newly recruited staff at the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, insisting there is no approval on file for any fresh recruitment at the agency and that NELFUND is, if anything, overstaffed.
According to sources within the ministry, NELFUND is struggling with personnel who lack office space or clearly defined duties, and the claim that a ministerial directive caused the delay is not only false but misleading. The sources traced the dispute back to a meeting in Lagos between NELFUND’s executive management and Chairman Jim Ovia, at which Ovia reportedly halted the recruitment process outright, citing the absence of board approval and the fact that management had never formally discussed hiring plans in the first place. When three Executive Directors pressed the Managing Director for proof of authorisation, the sources allege their request was simply ignored, and the Managing Director proceeded independently, running recruitment exercises and documentation outside official channels despite the objections.
The chairman subsequently directed that anyone recruited outside due process should not be placed on the organisation’s payroll and ordered a comprehensive review of staff ranks to ensure compliance with internal protocols. Following a later visit by NELFUND management to the minister’s office, sources allege the Managing Director held a private meeting with aides in which he vowed to press ahead with the recruitment anyway, and suggested the Board Secretary and Executive Director of Operations could confirm the instructions given in Lagos regarding both the recruitment freeze and the staff rank review. The sources described the situation at NELFUND as alarming, estimating that roughly 80 percent of the workforce is redundant, a problem they say all four key agency leaders acknowledged at a recent management meeting as requiring urgent attention, crediting the minister’s intervention with helping avert what could have become an organisational collapse. NELFUND administers student loans to eligible Nigerians in tertiary institutions.
