Last week, a court sentenced a member of staff of the Delta State University, Abraka, David Wonder Erhirhie to death by hanging for killing an admission seeker, Chinoso Ijezie in 2009.
He had collected N155,000 as fee to secure admission for her into the university but could not deliver on his promise. When the girl demanded a refund, he lured her to his home under the pretext that he would give her the money, then murdered her and buried her in a shallow grave.
The article did not provide more details about the story. There was nothing about the girl’s family, how they reacted to their daughter’s death and her murderer’s treachery. But we can guess that they would rather have her alive and not in school than dead because she wanted to get into school by all means.
With the limited spaces in our tertiary institutions, particularly the universities, there must be thousands of candidates that have fallen victim of the fraudulent activities of admission racketeers. Many institutions do not admit up to 10 per cent of those who apply, leaving a large number of desperate candidates at the mercy of unscrupulous academic and non academic workers in our tertiary institutions and their agents. These dishonest people who ought to act as parents to the young ones and advise them to work harder next time or comfort them to take heart if indeed they tried their best, rather place price tags on their illegal activities. They do not care how the candidates get the money many of them do not earn as monthly salaries; their selfish concern is lining their pockets with filthy lucre.
Some candidates source the money they use to pursue their admission from parents and relatives; others are forced to do all manner of unethical things to raise the money which sometimes goes as high as N200,000.
While sharing this story with someone, he told me how was duped of N60,000 by one Engineer Ben who assured him of a place in the University of Lagos. He had written the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), then UME, four times and was desperate to enter school. He thought he had a good chance because he made the post-UTME cut-off. Engineer Ben, who was not even an employee of the university, boosted his confidence. List after list was released and his name was not there. Yet Ben did not fail to assure him he would make it. The extent to which Ben deceived him was despicable because he even told him to go to a particular department to ask for the list because his name was on it. My source went to the department with confidence and insisted his name was on their list. They gave him the entire list to check for his name. He checked and checked to no avail. It was a futile search. He got no admission and never got his money back. His disappointment was almost unbearable.
To help applicants avoid getting into all sorts of traps with racketeers, tertiary institutions need to provide enough information about the admission process. Upfront candidates should know the number of spaces available in each department while preparing for the post-UTME screening. They should also know all the criteria the institution would consider in selecting its students including what they would consider in eliminating those who qualify but cannot be admitted because there is no space. Also important is the number of lists that would be released because these bad eggs keep candidates hoping even long after the whole exercise is over. With enough information, applicants know what their dealing with and can weigh their options.
After the admission exercise is over, tertiary institutions should initiate programmes that would offer counsel to applicants who did not make it. Some of them feel very depressed when they find their names are not on the list. Virtually all institutions, particularly the highly patronised ones cannot admit all their qualified candidates because they simply do not have the capacity. For instance, for the 2012/2013 academic session, the Yaba College of Technology could only admit 4,500 out of 110,000 candidates that applied for its National and Higher National Diploma (ND/HND), while the University of Ibadan admitted only 2671 out of 41,367 applicants. Informing candidates of the reasons they did not make it may make the news easier to bear.
It will also be good if institutions can suggest options those who plan to retake the examination the next year can take. The options could include considering admissions through alternative routes like taking remedial, diploma, or foundation programmes or earning their degrees through the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) platform. The initiative could also be counseling sessions for candidates to learn what they are doing wrongly, or what kind of skills or jobs they can pursue while waiting to get into school.
If institutions put such programmes in place, there would be less incentive to pursue admissions at all cost with grave consequences.
