The National Universities Commission (NUC) last week identified 41 of what it said were illegal universities operating in various parts of the country. It said the affected organisations had been shut down. This disclosure was made by a senior NUC official at the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) during a joint press conference. The clampdown on such unregistered entities was the outcome of an ongoing NUC/ICPC University System Study Review (USSR), and followed a court order obtained by ICPC.
The government's anti-corruption agency explained that the nationwide joint operation with security operatives involved seeking out and closing down the premises of the universities that are not in the NUC list of approved institutions, seizing their properties and arresting their operators, who would now face prosecution. Many of them claim to be affiliated either to well-established universities in the Britain or the United States. In an embarrassing twist, neighbouring West African countries too appear to have taken advantage of the boon in Nigeria by having a piece of the action. The Volta University College, Ghana, for instance, has been a recurring name every time a list of illegal universities in Nigeria is published, suggesting that the NUC's sanctions may not contain sufficient deterrence to stop farther exploitation of the wide gap between the educational needs of the country and the space available to accommodate them. To avoid going through the official route of registering an institution, some of the operators are itinerant in their operations. Many hard-pressed Nigerians desirous, sometimes even desperate, of having a university degree but severely constrained by the acutely limited space in existing universities, become vulnerable to operators of illegal universities, and fall prey to false promises of relief.
The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), which should function to complement conventional universities by providing equal opportunity access to tertiary education to segments of the Nigerian society irrespective of age, and thereby taking the pressure off the current bottleneck, has had limited impact in discharging this critical mandate. The undue and counterproductive emphasis that the government places on a university degree as key to a meal ticket or competitive employment only feeds the feverish frenzy to acquire it by all means, even if from dubious and unregistered schools. Those who lack the mental ability for acquiring a degree look for it, by hook and by crook.
The menace of illegal higher education schools in Nigeria can be checked through, first, a realistic increase in admission spaces in the country's institutions of higher learning, and, secondly a re-evaluation of the ratio between intrinsic skills and academic testimonials.
Of the over 1.5 million candidates that sit annually for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), only approximately 15 per cent get absorbed by public-funded universities. With over 70 public universities and 40 private universities in the country, over one million young boys and girls who qualify for a place in the universities are effectively edged out, with all the consequences. A rapid and accelerated increase in space to accommodate as many more of the candidates who qualify for admission would begin to weaken the attraction of dubious agencies that promise higher education they are not suited and licensed to provide. In such a scenario, it would not be profitable for them to operate, and would shrink in number and eventually peter out.
Parents, civil society organisations, the media and indeed the general public, need to play a role in this too, in order to end the nuisance that illegal educational institutions have become. They do this through sharing of information. Heads of primary and secondary schools should be wary of letting out their facilities to these after-school-hours classes; they could be joined as accomplices in any legal dispute. The NUC should go beyond publishing the list of illegal universities on its website; employers of labour in the public and private sectors should have the list sent to them, with the necessary caveats. This would educate them about illegal institutions whose certificates are not to be recognized for job or academic purposes.
Beyond all these however, the onus rests on the government to increase space in higher institutions and devise a strategy to deemphasise paper qualification only as a means of getting ahead in the Nigerian society.
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