FG To Review Foreign Scholarships, Prioritise Nigerian Tertiary Institutions — Minister

The federal government has announced plans to review its foreign scholarship and bilateral education arrangements, with a focus on redirecting public funds towards strengthening Nigerian tertiary institutions.

Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, said the government could no longer justify spending scarce public resources to send Nigerian students abroad to study programmes already available in universities, polytechnics and colleges of education across the country.

Alausa disclosed this while explaining the rationale behind the federal government’s decision to review its overseas scholarship arrangements, stressing that the policy was aimed at building domestic capacity and ensuring better value for public expenditure.

He recalled that shortly after assuming office, he was presented with a proposal involving about 100,000 Nigerian students travelling to Morocco to study courses taught in English, including mass communication and journalism.

According to him, the proposal raised concerns because the programmes were already available in Nigerian tertiary institutions, while the students would have been required to spend their first year learning French before commencing their chosen programmes.

Alausa said, “Number one, we have all those courses in Nigeria. And yet, number two, they were going to spend the first year learning French before they started the programme.”

He added that the cost of sponsoring such students abroad could not be justified when Nigeria had developed considerable capacity in its tertiary institutions.

“And number three, in the position of a few million to support this in Nigeria, we support thousands of them,” he said.

The minister said the government subsequently concluded that continuing the arrangement in its previous form would amount to an inefficient use of public resources.

“So the Bilateral Education Agreement was not making sense, again, to us in government. It was a way to waste government funds,” Alausa said.

He added, “And this President will not waste any public funds.”

The federal government had earlier announced the discontinuation of government-funded Bilateral Education Agreement scholarships, while retaining support for students already enrolled under the previous arrangements.

The government clarified that existing beneficiaries would not be abandoned and would continue to receive funding until the completion of their studies, while new government-funded awards under the arrangement were discontinued following the review.

The policy, however, does not amount to a blanket ban on Nigerians receiving scholarships from foreign governments.

According to the minister, foreign governments willing to sponsor Nigerian students can continue to provide such opportunities without necessarily requiring financial support from the Nigerian government.

“But when you stop the scholarship, you say countries that want to continue to give the scholarship can continue to do that,” he said.

Alausa said the circumstances that justified sending large numbers of Nigerian students abroad decades ago had changed significantly, following the expansion of capacity in the country’s tertiary institutions.

“When those programmes were set up 20 years ago, they were meant to get students to go to the government colleges where we did not have capacity,” he said.

“But in the last 20 years, we’ve built a number of capacities in the tertiary institutions — universities, polytechnics and colleges,” he added.

The review of foreign scholarships is part of broader reforms by the Federal Ministry of Education aimed at repositioning Nigeria’s education sector under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda.