Adebayo Picks Holes in FG’s Student Loan

The leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has picked holes in the much celebrated Federal Government student loan programme, stressing that all that the President Bola Tinubu administration needs to have done to give education access to the average Nigerian student without seeking for loan is to bring the cost of education down.

Speaking weekend in an interview with journalists, Adebayo said: “I don’t agree with them on their student loan, because all you need to do is bring the cost of education down, and an average person will be able to go to school without needing a loan.

“But even with the loan, they are not able to administer it properly. So anything they touch. The Tinubu Presidency is not a government. It may be a political movement that has now found itself in power. They can now decide to continue to strengthen themselves politically by capturing more governors, more senators and more political parties to join them, but they are not just in government. 

“However, they can also decide to say, let’s sit down; let us stop this and administer the economy.”

Adebayo urged President Tinubu that rather than worry about a political coalition ahead of the 2027 polls, he should be more concerned about the people’s anger against his government.

He noted that the president is politically savvy enough to know that the coalition is not his problem.

“He knows the people in the coalition. They are all friends. There’s hardly anybody in the coalition who you cannot find 10,000 pictures of them with the president. They are all together. The real thing that the president should worry about is the resentment of the people and the problems that people are facing in reality. It is not the coalition that has been putting pictures and billboards all over,” he said.

The SDP stalwart blamed President Tinubu for focusing on 2027, noting that what Nigerians have under Tinubu is not administration but presidency.

He said: “If we are to be fair to the Tinubu government, we should talk about the Tinubu presidency, not the Tinubu administration, because there’s no administration going on.

“What you have is an imperial majesty in the presidency. Their eyes are not to the ground. Do not call them an administration. Just call them the presidency, because they took a note of office that you are not the president, and they created a group who are in the state house. Beyond that, they have not been able to create an administration.”

He also noted the President Tinubu and his team of economic experts have not been able to give Nigerians a workable budget for two years running.