Former Vice President Abubakar Atiku has expressed his dissatisfaction with the treatment of Nigerian students under the Bilateral Education Agreement, BEA.
In a post on his X account, he criticised President Bola Tinubu‘s administration for neglecting students studying abroad.
Atiku highlighted that the scholarship program, which allows Nigerian students to pursue studies internationally, has been discontinued without notifying parents and has left around 1,600 students stranded.
He added that the temporary five-year suspension soon metamorphosed into outright abandonment, leaving about 1,600 young Nigerians stranded abroad with empty pockets and fading hope.
He noted that students received no payments from September to December 2023, and stipends were cut by 56 per cent in 2024 before stopping entirely.
‘I have been well briefed on how Nigerian students under the Bilateral Education Agreement, BEA, have been abandoned abroad.
‘Their pleas are simple and desperate: pay the stipends owed, now more than $6,000 per student. Yet from the corridors of power came a cold, technocratic explanation: scarce public funds must be managed “responsibly,” and money meant to keep these students alive abroad should instead be redirected home. In that reasoning, the humans behind the figures dissolved into abstractions, and duty was sacrificed on the altar of convenience.
‘The cruelty of the moment was sharpened by timing and tone. After months of cries from students and parents over unpaid allowances, the authorities announced the suspension with a levity that stunned those already on the brink. Between September and December 2023, the students were not paid, and in 2024, stipends were slashed by 56 per cent, from $500 to $220 a month, before stopping altogether, ” Atiku wrote.
The Alliance for Democracy (AD) stalwarts lamented that there was no payment throughout the whole of 2025, leaving students to live their days in perpetual hunger, rising rent arrears, and shame.
‘In Morocco, one student did not survive the ordeal, dying in November last year and turning quiet suffering into public grief. Parents and scholars poured into the streets of Abuja, protesting before the Ministries of Education and Finance, their placards heavy with sorrow and rage, their questions unanswered.
Atiku described the press statement, where the minister urged “fed up” students to return home, as expulsion by neglect, lambasting the Nigerian government for casting off its brightest children and leaving them to become objects of pity among peers from African countries that honour their obligations.
‘The BEA scheme was never a charity; it was a diplomatic agreement rooted in shared progress, revitalised in 1999 to build Nigeria’s future workforce through partnerships with nations such as China, Russia, Morocco, and Hungary.
‘Today, that pact lies broken, and across distant campuses, Nigerian scholars wait, not just for stipends, but for a sign that their country still remembers them.
