By Henry Okoduwa
The Federal Government finally woke up from it’s many years of slumber; years of foot dragging on the obnoxious certificate racketeering business that have seemed to repeatedly drag the country’s name in the mud to rule in a decisive manner recently, declaring that all degrees acquired from universities in the Republic of Benin and Togo not recognised and accredited by the Nigerian government be written off as invalid.
In what has been described by analysts as the biggest clampdown yet by any of the country’s administrations since independence, the Federal Government seemingly, in one fell swoop, brought the hammer down on the once thriving open-market hawking and pawning of university degrees, thus throwing spanner in the wheels of the well entrenched syndicate that has perpetrated the crime for God knows how long.
While making far-reaching pronouncements on the matter in his first-year-in-office anniversary interactions with the media last week, the country’s minister of education, Tahir Mamman disclosed that the Federal Government had decided to not only punish what he described as a “fraud that continues to damage the country’s image,” but render ill-gotten degrees from such underworld transactions invalid.
He went further to say that appropriate steps were being taken to ensure that beneficiaries of such deals would also face prosecution, while those found guilty of using such degrees to gain employment in both the private and public sector would be stripped of their jobs and prosecuted.
According to the minister, over 22,500 Nigerians are affected in the purge that particularly targets beneficiaries who got their degrees from universities of questionable statuses from the neighbouring Benin Republic and Togo between 2017 and 2023.
The action climaxed months of speculations on whether the discovery, based on the investigations by a Nigerian journalist — Umar Audu — that he had a degree delivered to him like pizza after paying a sumptuous amount of cash to a University in Cotonou, Benin Republic, named Ecole Superieure de Gestin et de Technologies (ESGT) in 2023, would provoke sufficient action to end the vicious cycle.
The weight of the allegations, exposed by the journalist on national television in January this year, would finally force the FG to action as a committee was hastily formed to confirm the findings.
According to the education minister, the recommendations of the findings which was unanimously adopted at a recent Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was what he had decided to share with the public.
In principle, and on paper, the promptness of the government’s decision to clamp down on these certificate infractions — a damaging and unpatriotic act that glorifies indolence over and above hardwork and legitimately earned qualifications — looks like the appropriate thing to do, except for a few noticeable exceptions.
Now, how come that the government through the Ministry of Education only decided to list the universities in the affected countries as the only ones they recognised after much time, energy and resources had been expended on these studying adventures by our students? Would it not have made sense if adequate information was made available to Nigerian students on which schools in these countries were viable to attend before they set out on what has now turned out a wild goose chase?
Has it occurred to the government, that encouraged by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) charter which allows free trade and free movement within the sub-region, that many Nigerians who have massively invested in knowledge acquisition and related infrastructure in the aforementioned countries may have already had such investments ruined by what education watchers have described as hasty?
Is it not instructive that the regular man-made obstacles our universities usually put in place to frustrate our admission-seeking students may have largely contributed to the current state of affairs? Because, it is totally illogical for Nigerians to seek alternatives for university education outside the shores of their countries when they have a fool-proof system that guarantees them what they seek elsewhere.
In recent years, admission into our citadels of higher learning have been mired in endemic corruption as admission agents working on behalf of some highly placed officials in the university system create seemingly insurmountable hurdles that engenders the breeding ground for money-for-hand admissions. It might take years of undercover work ala Umar Audu to expose this racket and those who have profited from it in the last two decades or so.
For now, it will be convenient to make flat denials about the non-existence of such underhand dealings in our universities’ admissions system!
Now, the countries who appear to have been smeared in this scandal are already planning counter measures in a bid to save face and restore some credibility to their university systems, according to reports.
This writer has learned that some African countries like Kenya, learning of the Benin and Togo imbroglio, have started to erect hurdles that could prove impossible to surmount, especially for Nigerians known to be the most nomadic seekers of varsity education in all of Africa.
Kenya are in the process of perfecting a legislation that will make it mandatory for students of Nigerian origin to first get endorsement from the Federal Government before being offered admissions in their universities in the foreseeable future.
This is just one reaction. No one knows what the governments of Benin and Togo are doing to mitigate the effects of the recent scandal as well as forestall a re-occurence. In all of this, future generations of our students will pay the price!
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALABAR QUESTION
The FG had hardly taken a decision on the Benin and Togo certifificate racketeering saga than another scandal relating to improper acquisition of some university degrees broke in the University of Calabar, one of the country’s better known Ivory Towers.
The media was awash with reports last week of how 54 illegally mobilised students of the University of Calabar were caught out by the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) as unqualified after discovering that they did not earn the degrees for which they were mobilised for.
According to the scheme’s Director of Information and Public Relations, Eddy Megwa, the 54 students were demobilised after they were found out to have illegally acquired the degrees for which they wanted to serve the nation with.
He would go on to openly commend the University’s Vice-Chancellor for alerting them to the anomaly before the action to invalidate the certificates was taken.
Those who have keenly followed the latest scandal feel that there is no reason why the university should not be sanctioned or even blacklisted like it was done with the students and schools found complicit in the Republic of Benin and Togo affair.
They argue that in the spirit of equity and fairness, the same treatment meted out to over 22,500 students who were alleged to have bought their degrees from Nigeria’s neighbours should be extended to the offending persons, as well as institution for justice to be seen to have been done.
This writer feels that a whole lot of overhaul and in-house cleansing of the Augean stables needs to done as what has so far been unearthed looks like a scratch on the surface as more institutions may also be currently enmeshed in this ongoing money-for-hand degrees’ sales and acquisition racket.
Then, on a permanent level, recommendations from several policy framework about the need to start de-emphasising on paper qualifications as the most guaranteed route to the country’s industrialisation may now need to be fully implemented to discourage these rising cases of fake certicates’ sales and acquisition.
Otherwise, we might wake up one day in the future having to deal with our entire country’s government constituted by persons who all bought their certificates. Such a scenario, I should say, will be too frightening to imagine!
