With so much emphasis on paper qualifications at the expense of the skills people possess and what they can deliver, it is not a surprise that everybody wants to possess one certificate or the other.
Also, many Nigerians are not satisfied with having the title of a simple Mister before their names, they want bigger titles like honorary doctorate degrees that will earn them some respect in the society.
The title, ‘Dr’ has since become two for one kobo. Getting these degrees and certificates has led some to toe the unholy path of certificate racketeering. ADESINA WAHAB reports.
Before the expose about how an undercover reporter obtained a first-degree certificate in six weeks from a university in Benin Republic, the nation was startled by the certificate racketeering scandal that broke out two months earlier at the Lagos State University, LASU.
It involved some teaching and non-teaching staff who were selling certificates to people for about N3 million. They were inserting names of people who never attended the university’s defunct satellite campuses into the list of graduates to be cleared by the Senate of the university. The university shut down the satellite campuses and was trying to clear the backlog of certificates to be issued to those who attended them.
The situation was so bad and the echoes of the malfeasance got to the attention of the then Vice Chancellor, Prof. Olanrewaju Fagbohun, SAN, who, in 2020, had to order a sting operation into the matter. At the end of the day, some teaching and non-teaching staff were indicted.
If you think such ugly development is new or that it is peculiar to a particular university, then listen to Eddy Megwa, the Director of Public Affairs of the National Youth Service Corps Scheme, NYSC. Megwa, who appeared on a Channels Television programme, recalled his experience when he was the Lagos State Coordinator of the scheme some years back.
“There was a particular period when over 4,000 corps members were posted to the state and I had this suspicion that some of them could have presented fake certificates to get enlisted in the scheme. So, I told them during a parade that anyone who knew he or she did not truly possess the certificates used to mobilise them for the scheme should gently opt out before they would be fished out.
”I also added that policemen, soldiers and other security agents were around with hand cuffs and their vehicles to take such fake certificate holders to custody and I gave them some time to think over it. Don’t be surprised that some left unceremoniously. I also recall that in 2006, the then Director General of the NYSC, Brig.- Gen. Yusuf Momoh, went to an orientation camp and asked a supposed corps member the title of his final project, the answer he gave was incredulous and further investigation revealed that his name was smuggled into the list of graduates from a particular university,” he said.
The main channels through which such evils are mostly perpetrated are study centres and satellite campuses. About two years ago, the then Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, NUC, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, said the commission had discovered 67 illegal universities and study centres in the country, and that they would be shut down. Those who didn’t know the havoc the existence of such centres wreaked on the system felt the decision was too harsh. To the critics of the commission, such centres were sources of employment and income for some people.