I’ve been watching the news about the NELFUND student loan, and the silence around it cuts deeper than most headlines. It isn’t just about policies—it’s about lives caught in pause.

Imagine a student waking before dawn, trekking miles because transport money is gone. Hunger doesn’t wait for lectures to end. A note costs ₦500, but ₦500 is the same money needed to eat twice in a day. That kind of math is cruel. And when the promise of NELFUND glimmered, students clung to it like air. Relief was close. Then came the delay. Hope suspended midair.

It hurts most in the small, invisible ways. A girl in the hostel hides her torn sandals under her desk. A boy skips classes, not for laziness but because his only shirt is still damp from yesterday’s wash. Group projects come up, and contribution money is whispered about—he laughs it off, but inside, the shame sits heavy.

Parents are drained, too. Some sell farm produce at a loss, some borrow with interest that grows like weeds. Yet the loan—the promised bridge—hasn’t arrived. And the waiting? That’s its own kind of suffering. Students calculate and recalculate, counting days, holding on to announcements that never mature into action.

The cruelest pain isn’t just empty pockets—it’s watching dreams stall. How do you focus on anatomy, engineering, or law when you’re haunted by the question of whether you’ll even eat tomorrow? Lectures lose meaning when survival is louder.

But still, they push. They show up. They write exams on empty stomachs. They smile in group photos. Beneath those smiles is grit, but also quiet exhaustion. If anything, that is the truest picture of Nigerian students today: enduring, waiting, and hoping that the promised loan won’t remain a line in a speech.

The NELFUND loan wasn’t just about money. It was about dignity, about the right to learn without being crushed by hunger and lack. And until it comes, the pain of waiting stays like a shadow over every campus.