2027 residential hopeful in the country, Atiku Abubakar waded into the financial problems facing some Nigerian students studying abroad, under the Bilateral Education Agreement, BEA.
The former Nigeria’s vice president in his X post on Sunday lamented what he described as the federal government’s neglect of the students who are product of diplomatic arrangement between Nigeria and their host countries.
Abubakar’s intervention comes on the heels of the recent protests by the parents of the over 1, 600 young Nigerians studying abroad at the federal Ministry of Education and Finance in Abuja last week, demanding that the federal government bail out their wards, who they claimed have become stranded in foreign countries because they are being owed feeding and other allowances by the government.
One of the students, Bashir Malami was said to have died recently as a result of the problems while others claimed they have been sent out of their accommodations by their landlords and are struggling to feed themselves because the federal government failed to pay their allowances.
Angry parents under the BEA Parents Forum led by Mathew Abang told journalist in Abuja during their protest that their children, who are on various BEA and other scholarship schemes, have not been paid their stipends for 16 months allowance, describing the students situation as very pitiable.
Reacting, Abubakar said the students are being owed close to three year stipends which he claimed had alerady been slashed by the federal government to $220 from $500, wondering why the students have been abandoned to their fate by the federal government who sent them to the the foreign countries to study.
“The BEA is a scholarship scheme that began in 1993 and was revitalised in 1999. It allows Nigerian students to pursue undergraduate and postgraduate studies in various countries through agreements between Nigeria and those nations,” Abubakar said.
“However, under the @officialABAT administration, the BEA scholarship programme, a bridge between Nigeria and the world, has been quietly discontinued without notice to the parents/wards of the students and without any consideration for their education.
“I am informed that what was initially described as a temporary five-year suspension soon metamorphosed into outright abandonment, leaving about 1,600 young Nigerians stranded abroad with empty pockets and fading hope.
“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. There was no payment throughout the whole of 2025.
“I gathered that 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. 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.
“Then came the final wound: defiance dressed as policy. In a press statement, the minister declared that any student “fed up” could be financed to return home, as though abandoning years of study and shattered dreams were a minor administrative detail. To anxious parents, it sounded like expulsion by neglect, Nigeria 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.”
The Minister of Education, DrTunji Alausa, had last year disclosed that the federal government has scrapped the BEA programme to priotise domestic scholarship.
Nigeria has had a bilateral education agreement/student exchange scheme with countries in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia.
Among these countries are Russia, China, Hungary, Morocco, Venezuela, and Algeria.
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