ASUU, NELFUND Heist and the Post-truth Era

 In 2022, during one of the longest industrial actions in Nigeria’s university history, many of us wrote tirelessly—articles, essays, and public commentary—not to defend the strikes, but to make it clear to all who cared to listen that, without sustainable public funding and institutional autonomy, Nigeria’s university system would crumble under the weight of state neglect and policy sabotage.

At the time, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) took a stand, calling out the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) as a tool not just of centralised inefficiency but of systemic fraud. ASUU warned that NELFUND—the student loan scheme—would become another bureaucratic pipeline for elite looting, cloaked in the language of reform, more precisely, “yaren #AljanunKasuwa.”
Rather than evaluating these claims on their merit, many Nigerians—conditioned by years of anti-intellectual sentiment and post-truth narratives promoted by selfish individuals—opted for ridicule. The Union was caricatured. Academics were mocked. The structural concerns we raised were reduced to memes and hashtags. Truth, in a nation fatigued by cynicism, became optional.
Now, the facts speak—loudly.
Today, Daily Trust reported that at least N71.2 billion out of the N100 billion disbursed for student loans has been diverted, quoting the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). The funds, meant to support students from low-income families, allegedly vanished under the supervision of university managements entrusted with disbursement.
The consequences are neither abstract nor distant. Across the country, thousands of students from struggling households have been forced to drop out—not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of money. This is not just a policy failure; it is a moral catastrophe.
We must now ask: how many times must a warning be proven right before a nation listens?
This moment requires more than outrage. It demands systemic reckoning. Nigeria’s ruling class has long treated education as a site of extraction, not development. Every “reform” that bypasses stakeholder consensus—especially that of academic unions—has predictably produced a Frankenstein: IPPIS, UTAS controversies, NELFUND, and now this alleged heist.
The post-truth age thrives where memory is short, history is denied, and expertise is mocked. But facts, like debts, don’t disappear—they compound. And now, we’re paying interest.
It is time for a sober national conversation on how we fund, govern, and protect higher education. There is no shortcut. If we want competent doctors, engineers, teachers, and administrators in the next decade, we must treat education as a public good—not a political transaction.
ASUU may not be perfect. No union is. But when it rings the alarm—again and again—we ignore it at our collective peril. For a country desperate for progress, perhaps the most dangerous thing we can do is mock the people trying to tell the truth.

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