A financial expert, Tunde Alao-Olaifa, has described Nigeria’s student loan scheme as a “financial time machine”, noting that the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has evolved into a N200 billion stimulus, reshaping access to education and injecting liquidity into the economy.

Alao-Olaifa, who is the Group Chief Financial Officer and Head of Strategy/Principal Investment at Leadway Holdings Limited, said the core idea behind student loans is to enable young people to “borrow from their future earnings to fund their current education.”

“The basic premise of a student loan is a beautiful piece of financial time travel. Right now, you are 19, you have no money, but in five years, you will be an engineer, an accountant, or perhaps a highly paid prompt engineer.

“You will have money then. So, you borrow some of your future money, pool it back to the present, pay your school fees, and then spend your future years paying back the past,” he said.

He explained that before the Federal Government intervened, most Nigerian students relied heavily on family support.
“Historically, this time machine was powered almost entirely by the ‘Bank of Mom, Dad, and the Benevolent Uncle in the

Diaspora.’ But over the last few years, that bank hit its absolute credit limit,” he added.
According to him, the introduction of the student loan scheme under President Bola Tinubu marked a major shift in funding education.

“In what might be recorded as one of the most pragmatic and consequential policy bets of his administration, the President recognised that human capital cannot be funded by exhausted parents,” he stated.

Citing data from the scheme’s operations, Alao-Olaifa noted that NELFUND has experienced exponential growth over the past year.

He said: “Between March 2025 and March 2026, the scale of this operation went from a modest pilot to a macroeconomic event.

“In early 2025, they had around 451,000 applicants and had disbursed roughly N45 billion. By March 2026, we are looking at 1.7 million applications, over 1.1 million actual beneficiaries, and a staggering N206.2 billion out the door,” he added.

He described the growth trajectory as unprecedented. “That is almost a 4x jump in volume and a 4.5x jump in cash disbursed in a single year. It is the kind of hockey-stick growth chart that makes tech founders salivate, and chief risk officers quietly update their resumes,” he said.

Alao-Olaifa commended the management of the fund, particularly its Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, for what he termed efficient and transparent operations.