Nigerian crackdown on fake degrees ‘needs to go further’

The Nigerian government’s ban on university certificates from some African countries is an attempt to crack down on the “serious and pervasive” issue of fake degrees, but will not solve the problem, it has been warned.

After announcing a ban on the accreditation and evaluation of degrees from neighbouring Benin and Togo, the government has indicated that it could extend this to Uganda, Kenya and Niger.

Debate over fake degrees is not new to Nigeria, with Salisu Buhari, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, forced to resign in 1999 after it was discovered he had forged a degree from the University of Toronto. And Bola Tinubu, elected president a year ago, has been forced to deny claims that his qualification from Chicago State University is forged.

Ebenezer Obadare, the Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Times Higher Education that fake degrees remained a big problem.

“One may now rightly presume every diploma tendered by a degree holder in Nigeria to be fake until proven otherwise,” he said. “That’s how serious and pervasive the phenomenon is.”

Professor Obadare said a ban – or a “buyer beware”, which means that degrees from certain places are no longer officially recognised – was the appropriate response on some levels because it meant that the state was recognising the problem.

But he said the ban only applied to certain African countries, ignoring the existence of diploma mills in many Western countries, where “members of the political elite have obtained their own ‘real’ degrees”.

“The only difference between getting a degree from a Western diploma mill versus its African counterpart is that you pay more for the former.”

The government’s announcements come after an investigation by a Nigerian journalist, who revealed how he obtained a degree in just six weeks from an institution in Benin and used it to enrol in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

Professor Obadare, who is also a senior fellow at New York University, said the ban was unlikely to have any significant impact on the country’s higher education sector because it would not stop Nigerians desperate for degrees from going outside the country to look for them.

And the existence of multiple offshore and online universities could make it difficult to separate the “real” from the “fake”, he added.

“Finally, the policy does not begin to address the problem of the poor quality of Nigerian higher education, the effect of which is that you can get a ‘real’ degree that is for all practical purposes ‘fake’.”

The National Universities Commission (NUC) also recently closed down 58 universities within Nigeria that had been operating as “degree mills”.

In a statement at the time, Chris Jibreel Maiyaki, the acting executive secretary of the NUC, said: “For the avoidance of doubt, anybody who patronises or obtains any certificate from any of these illegal institutions does so at his or her own risk. Certificates obtained from these sources will not be recognised for the purposes of the NYSC, employment and further studies.”

Moses Oketch, professor of international education policy and development at UCL, said the issue gained media attention because of unfounded claims about the president’s education, and a ban on degrees from certain countries might not be appropriate.

“A thorough investigation and improved methods for authenticating degree certificates should be implemented, such as requesting transcripts and graduation lists to verify attendance and study at a university,” added Professor Oketch.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com