Federal Government has stopped funding part of the Bilateral Education Agreement scholarship programme, saying it can no longer justify spending hundreds of millions of naira to send Nigerian students abroad to study courses already available in the country.

Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed that the government had received a proposal shortly after he assumed office to spend N650 million on 150 Nigerian students sent to Morocco for one year.

Alausa said the proposal was rejected because the students would have to spend an additional year learning French before commencing their academic programmes, even though the courses they intended to study were available in Nigerian tertiary institutions.

He said the same N650 million, if deployed locally, could support thousands of Nigerian students rather than a fraction of that number abroad.

Alausa spoke in Abuja yesterday while fielding questions at the unveiling of the Tertiary Institutions National Laureate Prize.

The minister questioned the rationale for sending Nigerian students to countries such as Algeria and Morocco to study programmes available locally, noting that both countries are French-speaking, while some Nigerian students were being sponsored to study English, journalism and psychology there.

Alausa said the BEA arrangement might have been justified about two decades ago when Nigeria lacked adequate capacity in some specialised fields, but argued that the country’s tertiary education system had since expanded significantly.

He described the Federal Government-funded aspect of the programme as an inefficient use of scarce resources.

The minister, however, clarified that the decision did not amount to a ban on foreign scholarships, stressing that countries willing to continue offering scholarships to Nigerians would remain free to do so.

He said the government’s objection was specifically to committing Nigerian public funds to programmes where the educational value did not justify the cost.

The minister also linked the decision to the Federal Government’s push to strengthen domestic tertiary institutions and to make public education spending more sustainable.

He said the newly introduced Tertiary Institutions National Laureate Prize was similarly designed to ensure that intellectual achievement, research and innovation received sustained national recognition.

According to him, the prize will cover six thematic areas and be open to universities, polytechnics, monotechnics and colleges of education across the federal, state and private sectors.

He said the selection process would begin at the institutional level before moving to the zonal and national stages, with safeguards to ensure that only verified, original projects compete.