EPIDEMIC OF FAKE UNIVERSITY DEGREES  

Regulatory authorities should be alive to their responsibilities

A thriving educational racket has gripped Nigeria. From Republic of Benin to Togo and other African countries, certificate entrepreneurs have recruited agents in Nigeria who offer admissions and award bogus degrees in what has become a very lucrative enterprise. With the right money, and without stepping out of the country, people are conferred with degrees in any field of study. And, as we are now also finding out, these ‘graduates’ are easily mobilised for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme which then confers further legitimacy on what are no more than fake credentials.   

Last week, the federal government suspended the evaluation and accreditation of university degree certificates from five African countries. The National Universities Commission (NUC) has also released a list of unaccredited private universities labelled ‘Degree Mills.’ These actions were sequel to a media report which detailed how an investigative journalist acquired a degree from a university in Benin Republic under two months and was mobilised for the NYSC scheme. “This report lends credence to suspicions that some Nigerians deploy nefarious means and unconscionable methods to get a degree with the end objective of getting graduate job opportunities for which they are not qualified,” according to the Federal Ministry of Education spokesperson, Augustina Obilor-Duru. She stated that the suspension will subsist until the outcome of an investigation by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and some identified countries.  

While the demand from certificate-hungry Nigerians may be driving the epidemic of fake degrees, it is worrying that it took an investigative news report for the authorities to be drawn to the sorry state of affairs. Questions remain of how some of these institutions came to operate in our country without regulatory oversight. Worse still, there does not seem to be any reliable evaluation method for assessing the credentials of those offered jobs, including in our institutions of higher learning or places in the NYSC scheme. 

 Indeed, in June 2022, the NUC directed vice-chancellors of all universities in the country to compile a list of all professors which must include their names, department, year of professorship, and area of specialisation. “In the process of validating the submissions, university senates have, in some cases, uncovered that quite a number of professors are either fake or are yet to mature to full professors,” then NUC Executive Secretary, Abubakar Rasheed confirmed. Two years earlier, NUC had published a list of more than 200 fake professors in universities across the country. 

Even when Nigerians have known for years that many top decision makers in our public services conned their way into critical positions without the qualifications they claim, these reports are still very damaging. There is hardly any professional field today where these fraudsters have not invaded. From fake pharmacists whose prescriptions are often fatal for patients to fake teachers whose students are candidates for failure to fake journalists who write to blackmail, it is now difficult to distinguish between genuine and fake professionals in our country.  

Such is the level of decay in the system that when an ordinary Nigerian walks into a hospital, chances are that the ‘doctor’ on duty may just be a glorified ward attendant. Some years ago, a fake medical doctor was discovered to have served in the Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) for nine years. The “doctor” rose to Grade Level 13 in the ministry and had worked in the Departments of Hospital Services and Health Planning Research and Statistics (HPRS) before he was eventually detected as a fraud. Investigations revealed that the quack doctor secured employment by using the stolen documents of his childhood friend and best man who happened to be a medical doctor. 

  Meanwhile, the media cannot be exonerated from this national parade of shame. When politicians and business people arrange for some of these dubious certificates, they rent funny gowns with which they take photographs, and journalists immediately begin to address them by these bogus labels- ‘Professor’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Engineer,’ etc. Soon it becomes a manner of speaking, and the rest is added on. It is therefore important not only for regulatory authorities to be alive to their responsibilities, but also for critical stakeholders to begin checkmating the antics of these fraudsters.