By Funmilayo Adeyemi
The Acting Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Chris Maiyaki has said that Nigerian parents had placed a lot of premium on university certifications resulting to illegal degree awarding institutions they send their children to.
Maiyaki, while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on the illegitimate degree awarding institutions, said satellite campuses remained banned across the country.
He explained that though university is a game changer, but advised parents to exercise caution in ensuring they scrutinise institutions before sending their children to acquire certificates.
“Everybody is right to pursue university education but how you go about it is the cross of the matter.
“And then the issue of lack of access, the huge gap between supply and demand makes parents desperate about getting university education for their children wherever they can get it and the greed of fraudulent persons with commercial undertone,” he said.
He said that the country had been challenged with the spread of satellite campuses/outreach centres across the country leading to the award of unauthorised degree certificates.
Maiyaki explained that a committee was however set up to stamp out illegal institutions across the country.
“When we were challenged by this menace of our satellite campuses, NUC in 2000 undertook resource assessment of all outreach centres and we came up with the state of affairs of satellite campuses.
“We wrote to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and FEC was so gracious and there was a total ban of satellite campuses at that time.
“We took a step further at NUC and shut down these centres. So satellite campuses remained banned and outlawed.
“We establish a committee on the closure of illegal universities and we mandated them to identify, locate and prosecute those perpetrating illegalities and we also do this in a multi- stakeholders collaboration involving security agencies,” he said.
He added that a new committee was reconstituted in 2021 to identify and prosecute operators of illegal institutions noting that the stamp out recorded huge success. (NAN)