Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has accused the administration of President Bola Tinubu of abandoning Nigerian students studying overseas under the Bilateral Education Agreement, BEA, warning that the alleged breach has left about 1,600 young Nigerians stranded abroad and stripped of support.

In a statement yesterday, Atiku said the BEA scholarship scheme was quietly discontinued under the Tinubu administration without notice to parents or wards and without consideration for students already midway through their studies overseas.

He explained that the BEA, which began in 1993 and was revitalised in 1999, was designed to allow Nigerian students pursue undergraduate and postgraduate education through agreements between Nigeria and partner countries, describing it as a diplomatic bridge now left broken.

“What was initially described as a temporary five-year suspension soon metamorphosed into outright abandonment,” Atiku said.

According to him, the decision has left beneficiary students abroad without stipends, with outstanding allowances now running into thousands of dollars per student.

“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,” he said.

Atiku said the hardship deepened between September and December 2023, when stipends were unpaid, before allowances were cut by 56 per cent in 2024 from $500 to $220 per month and later stopped entirely.

He added that there was no payment throughout 2025.

“The cruelty of the moment was sharpened by timing and tone. Hunger, rent arrears, and shame have become the daily companions of the beneficiary students.

“In Morocco, one student did not survive the ordeal, dying in November last year and turning quiet suffering into public grief,” he said.

He noted that parents and students had protested in Abuja, gathering at the ministries of education and finance to demand answers, but said their appeals had largely been ignored.

The former vice president criticised remarks attributed to the education minister suggesting that students who were ‘fed up’ could be financed to return home, saying the comment reduced years of study and sacrifice to an administrative inconvenience.

“To anxious parents, it sounded like expulsion by neglect. Today, that pact lies broken,” he said.

He added that Nigerian scholars scattered across foreign campuses were waiting not only for their stipends, but for reassurance that their country had not forgotten them. (Vanguard)

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