The Nigerian government has vowed to flush out workers with fake certificates in public and private organisations.
The Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, made the vow on Friday while speaking in Abuja when he received the report of an inter-ministerial Investigative committee on degree certificate milling from the chairman of the committee, Prof. Jubrila Amin.
The minister said that it was possible that some workers in public and private organisations were carrying fake certificates.
His words, “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 which need to be flushed out. This report is a product of a thorough investigation.”
The minister noted that it was sad that someone who should come out from a Nigerian institution with a 2:1 or 2:2 was now parading an international certificate of first class.
He stressed that “The ministry is determined to take steps to sanitise the system.”
Mamman, who vowed to take decisive action to ensure standards were enshrined in Nigeria’s education system, noted that “we can’t afford to let down our country when it comes to standards.”
The committee Chairman, Prof. Amin, while presenting the report, lamented what he described as horrible standards of education in the schools investigated.
Prof. Amin said that many of the schools awarding degree certificates were an eyesore, stressing that the problems at hand required speedy intervention.
He recommended that all agencies in the education sector must digitise/automate their system, noting that automating the entire education system was a way to go in such a way that one could sit in his or her office and monitor what is happening in all tertiary institutions.
Prof. Amin said that in the course of the investigation, “We realised that the present programme of accreditation and evaluation of results is inadequate.”
According to him, establishing more universities in the country to train PhD holders would help a lot rather than Nigerians going outside in search of certificates while ending up getting fake certificates.
He called on the National Universities Commission (NUC) to pay more attention to institutions offering part time or sandwich programmes to avoid a repeat of 2017 saga of centres offering unaccredited courses.
He noted that “People go and get fake degrees and we have been to those countries and we know what a proper degree looks like, we know what the fake one looks like.
“We have given it to the ministry to scrutinise anyone presenting a certificate from those institutions and anything else is fake.
”It is up to the ministry to find out people with fake certificates and deal with them in whatever way they deem fit.”
Recall that the minister of education on January 9 inaugurated an inter-ministerial committee to investigate the veracity of allegations of degrees racketeering within both foreign and local private universities.
The committee was to review the role of any Ministry, Department and Agency (MDA) or its officials in facilitation of the recognition and procurement of fake certificates in question.
