The Federal Government has vowed to flush out persons working with fake certificates in both public and private organisations.
Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, stated this while speaking in Abuja on Friday when he received the report of an Inter-Ministerial Investigative Committee on Degree Certificate Milling from the chairman of the committee, Prof. Jubrila Amin.
It would be recalled that the Minister, on January 9, 2024, inaugurated an Inter-Ministerial Committee to examine the veracity of allegations of degrees racketeering within both foreign and local private universities.
The committee was mandated to review the role of any MDA or its officials in facilitation of the recognition and procurement of fake certificates in question.
Prof. Mamman, who expressed sadness over what has been uncovered during the investigations, said that the ministry would work with relevant agencies to sanitise the education sector and rid it of any fake tendency.
“We can’t afford to have the integrity of our education soiled by some few persons.
“It is possible that some are carrying fake certificates in public and private organisations who need to be flushed out. This report is a product of a thorough investigation.
“It is sad that someone who should come out from a Nigerian institution with a 2:1 or 2:2 is now parading an international certificate of first-class.
“The ministry is determined to take steps to sanitise the system,” he said.
Presenting the report, chairman of the Inter-ministerial Committee, Prof. Amin, decried the horrible standards of education in the affected schools, saying that many of those schools awarding degree certificates were an eyesore.
Amin said the problems at hand required speedy intervention, recommending that all agencies in the education sector must digitise/automate their systems.
He said that automating the entire education system was a way to go in such a way that you could sit in your office and monitor what is happening in all tertiary institutions.
According to him, “in the course of our investigation, we realised that the present programme of accreditation and evaluation of results is inadequate.”
He, therefore, called for more universities in the country, saying that more universities to train PhD holders would help a lot rather than Nigerians going outside in search of certificates while ending up getting fake ones.
He also urged the National Universities Commission (NUC) to pay more attention to institutions offering part-time or sandwich programmes, “so we don’t have a repeat of 2017 saga of centres offering unaccredited courses.”