The Federal Government (FG) has vowed to sack personnel in public and private organisations working with fake certificates.
This was disclosed at the weekend by the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamma when he received the report of an Inter-Ministerial Investigative Committee on Degree Certificate Milling from the Chairman of the committee, Prof. Jubrila Amin.
Mamman, who expressed disgust at the anomalies uncovered during the investigations, said the ministry would work with relevant agencies to initiate sanity in the education sector and rid it of fake tendencies.
“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 that need to be flushed out. This report is a product of a thorough investigation,” he said.
“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,” Mamma said.
“We can’t afford to let down our country when it comes to standards,” he added.
The Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee, Prof. Jubrila Amin, who presented the report, condemned the standard of education in the schools awarding degree certificates, saying they are substandard.
Amin who said that the challenge required a speedy intervention, recommended that all agencies in the sector must digitise or automate their system so that they could sit in the office and monitor what is happening in all tertiary institutions.
“In the course of our investigation, we realised that the present programme of accreditation and evaluation of results is inadequate,” Amin added.
He, therefore, urged the National Universities Commission (NUC) to pay more attention to institutions offering part-time or sandwich programmes to avert a repeat of the 2017 saga of centres offering unaccredited courses.
“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,” he said.
