By EmekaOMEIHE (PIX)
Three recent but closely related events again brought to the fore all that is wrong with the Nigerian education system. First was a report published by an online medium over alleged certificate racketeering at the Lagos State University, LASU.
The medium claimed that a certificate racketeering syndicate operating within the university, sold authentic LASU degree certificates to willing buyers for between N2million to N3million depending on the intricacies of the course under bargain. Given the position of LASU as a highly rated state university in the country, the report must have come to many as a huge surprise.
But in a very swift response, the management of the university said it had brought the allegations to the attention of the law enforcement agencies which are yet to conclude their investigations. It promised that its inquiries into the allegation will be published and appropriate action taken.
There has been ‘no cover-up’ and there will be ‘no cover-up’ LASU management reassured.
The second was the shutdown by the federal government of 18 foreign university campuses operating illegally in the country and the temporary suspension of evaluation and accreditation of degree certificates from the Republic of Benin and Togo. Five of the universities which the federal government described as degree mills are domiciled in the USA, six in the UK and three in Ghana among other countries.
The action followed revelation by an investigative reporter that he secured a degree certificate from one university in the Republic of Benin within six months after paying an agreed sum of money. That was not all. Having been armed with the procured degree certificate, he successfully enrolled for the compulsory National Youth Service Corps NYSC programme.
The suspension will subsist pending the outcome of an investigation by the ministries of foreign affairs and education of the countries involved; the Department of State Services DSS and the NYSC.
There was also the altercation between the National Universities Commission, NUC and some universities following the publication of a list of universities allegedly harbouring fake professors indicted by the NUC. The publication raised so much dust that some universities were compelled to issue statements dissociating their institutions from the alleged fake professors listed against their establishments.
But the NUC denied the report that it uncovered a list of 100 fake professors in some universities across the country. It clarified that though it initiated a verification process for academics in 2019 with the intent of compiling and publishing a list of full professors in the Nigerian university system, it found some anomalies such as associate professors being listed as full professors. The commission said it shared the collated data with the universities for authentication as to who qualified to be a full professor and that at no point did it release a list of fake professors in 2024.
That clarification would seem to have put paid the controversy over the purported list of fake professors that surfaced in the public domain. But this is not the first time the NUC would be raising issues on the abuse the ‘professor’ title has been subjected to in the country.
In 2011, the commission had cried out that the university tradition in the appointment of professors which requires peer-review and assessment by at least three external professors in the same field from both within and outside the country was being breached. That tradition also requires that appointees to the rank of professor must have a “professorial chair”.
That is not all. The commission equally complained of instances where some individuals parade themselves as professors without evidence of affiliation to any recognized university or the academic field they made such scholarly contributions.
The NUC further highlighted instances where parastatals, research institutes and allied establishments which have neither an academic senate nor affiliation to any recognized university awarded professorships.
Even as the NUC denied publishing a list of fake professors as bandied in some sections of the media, the reality is that this country is home to fake professors. There are fake professors because some of those who parade themselves in that garb did not meet the conditions for adorning such titles. They were neither assessed by at least three external professors in the relevant fields from within and outside the country nor do they have a professorial chair.
Some others who adorn the title without evidence of affiliation to any recognized university or the academic field they made such scholarly contributions fall within the fake category. Professorships awarded by parastatals, research institutes and allied establishments in contravention of extant regulations are also fake. These breaches demonstrate very clearly, the existence of a pool of fake professors both within and outside the university system.
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That may be the real source of the fake professorship controversy which the NUC is reluctant to expose. But the NUC as a regulatory body is not really helpless in this matter. It is curious however that more than 12 years after the commission exposed the abuse the title of professorship was being subjected to, it is not on record that any effort has been made to address the problem.
It is not just enough to lament the abuse to which some universities, research institutes and allied establishments have subjected the title of ‘professor’, the NUC must go beyond lamentations to wield the big stick to tame the monster.
The commission and the relevant ministries should share the blame for inaction in sanctioning institutions and persons known to have run against extant regulations in the appointment of professors. One quick way of weeding out the fake from the rank of genuine professors is a prompt compilation and publication of the authentic list of genuine professors which NUC commenced in 2019 with dates of their elevation and institutions. With such data, it will become easy to fish out the fake professors from within our midst.
But then, it remains a sad commentary that parastatals, research institutes and allied establishments under the federal government ministries go outside their mandate to appoint professors in contravention of subsisting regulations without sanctions. This shows how disorganized, disorderly and uncoordinated planning and supervision within our education have remained.
The same confusion is manifest in the existence of fake campuses of foreign universities within our shores awarding fake degrees with the authorities looking the other way. The existence of illegal campuses is more worrisome given that this is not the first time the government would declare them illegal.
How many of them continued to operate for years in the face of their illegality is a measure of the seriousness of the government in enforcing standards in the country’s education system. It is not just enough to shut down these campuses. The government must move further to seal all the premises to demonstrate unambiguously the illegality of their activities.
But these fake degree awarding mills thrive because Nigerians show uncommon interest in the patronage of their services. This should not be surprising given the penchant by both the high and the low in the country to discard the rules of decent conduct.
The desecration and debasing of all institutions in the country have been so much so that it is difficult to make significant progress without serious ethical redirection and moral re-orientation. With the size, influence and prominence of the country within the sub-region, the bug that is afflicting universities in Benin and Togo must have crept from the domino effect of the breakdown of standards in Nigeria. The leadership is to blame.
Even then, our universities are not free from those allegations for which the federal government suspended the evaluation and accreditation of universities in Benin and Togo. Not with the proliferation of federal, state and private universities. Not with the indecent haste with which the National Assembly is moving to pass a law for the approval of 47 additional federal universities without a template for their funding – a move ASUU president, Prof Emanuel Osodeke blames for the falling standards of education.
The investigative panel by the government yet offers another opportunity for a total re-evaluation and re-examination of the entire gamut of the nation’s education system to re-position it to meet world class standards. That our universities trail behind in the world university ranking index, is a measure of the incalculable harm wrought by the lowering of standards, fake degree mills and fake professors.
