• Shocking findings by ICPC reveal academic fraud, sex-for-marks, leakages of exam questions, certificate forgery in tertiary institutions
By Sam Otti
Memories of school days have continued to haunt Mrs Ijay Keze (not real names) like a scary nightmare, years after she had graduated from one of the public universities in the country. A gush of disgust rips her heart whenever she recalls how randy lecturers, demanding sex for marks, ruined her four-year undergraduate programme.
Like other female victims with bags of secret, Mrs Keze lost the battle in her final year when she hesitantly gave in to her raunchy project supervisor. The man, in his late 50s, had repeatedly warned her that she would never graduate from the university if she proved stubborn. The young lady accepted an unholy romance that endured for a night but the incident left a gaping wound in her heart that refused to heal over the years.
She said the Sexual Harassment Bill, which is before the National Assembly, should be considered a legislative priority and passed into law to protect young ladies from being sexually exploited by amorous teachers.
If the claim of Nkang Sinemobong Ekong, a 400-level Law student, University of Calabar (UNICAL) survives the rigours of law, she had for once proved that silence is not golden in the face of abuse. Unlike several victims of sexual harassments on campus that live in the conclave of silence, Ekong made headlines severally over an allegation of sexual harassment by her lecturer, the Dean, Faculty of Law, Prof. Cyril Ndifon. She claimed that the lecturer raped her in his office while she was re-writing a test on Law of Trust.
However, Prof Ndifon denied the allegation, insisting that he was not given fair hearing on the matter and accused the university management and the Police of colluding to frustrate him. He had been fighting to save his career after an investigative panel set up by the university suspended him. The Registrar, Mr. Moses Abang, signed the letter suspending him from the university.
“I wish to state that the petition of Ms. Nkang Sinemobong Ekong, which her parents predicated theirs on, speaks volume of its spuriousness and falsehood. Its careful perusal supports my innocence and reveals that these petitions are absolutely unfounded and maliciously contrived to pull down my integrity,” the embattled lecturer said in his five-page reply to the query from the university management.
While Ndifon continues to plead his innocence, another lecturer in the university, identified as Dr Akintunde, had earlier been suspended over similar allegation of sexual harassment of his student, a claim he also denied. The accused said he was a victim of blackmail by the female student, and exonerated himself of any wrongdoing.
Claims of sexual harassment by female students against male lecturers have become so common in public universities. Sadly, most of these cases were never prosecuted. Also, female students equally run to town with the news that they have been sexually molested, in a desperate attempt to settle scores with lecturers they accuse of being too strict or stingy with their marks. Affected lecturers often spend years in legal battle trying to prove their innocence and regain their job.
Recently, the President, Women Arise for Change Initiative, Dr. Joe Okei-Odumakin, led hundreds of University of Lagos (UNILAG) students and lecturers, and some celebrities in a walk targeted at curtailing rape and sexual harassment both on campus and in the society.
Tagged Silence is not Golden: A walk Against Rape, the awareness programme was organised by the female students of Moremi Hostel, with several students, lecturers, Nollywood actress, Folake Daramola Salako; a music icon, Mr. Michael Stephens, also known as Ruggedman and other activists in attendance.
Okei-Odumakin described rape as oppressive, a forceful means of possession and an evil that must be condemned. “Rape has destroyed lives, it has not repaired any, and it has to be stopped. Many promising girls have had their morals destroyed, their confidence conquered, their esteem lowered and their future destabilized”, she said.
She explained that rape does not only affect the psyche of the immediate victims, but also blurs a generation each time it occurs. “This is so, in that the victims develop an altered psychological process that affect how they relate with families, friends, associations and the general society”, she stressed.
Okei-Odumakin advised university authorities to put measures in place that would check abuses. She also encouraged those currently being pestered for such abuse to speak out.
Nollywood Star, Salako, advised victims not to hide their faces in shame but to speak out. She noted that incidence of rape has become quite common, especially in higher institutions.
“University authorities must put measures in place to check mischievous male lecturers from sexually harassing female students and also discourage female students from sexually harassing their lecturers. It is not only unethical to base academic success on such unfair impositions, but also unhealthy and destructive to do so.”
Moremi Hall Mistress, Prof Virgy Onyene, also condemned the sexual harassment of women. “Those who have been victims must speak out. With proper counseling, they will overcome the trauma and also expose rapists, thereby cutting off their chances of violating others.”
Also, Moremi Hall Chairperson, Miss Zainab Olaitan, said silence is not golden in the face of sexual harassment, adding that, “We must all speak in one voice by saying no to rape, no to gender abuse.”
The Director, Students Affairs (DSA), Unilag, Prof. Tunde Babawale, said Unilag had never condoned impunity, insisting that students had been given the opportunity through complaint unit to either drop anonymous complaints or call the Vice Chancellor, DSA, Hall Mistress and other channels to report sexual harassment or rape.
He said, “We must all discourage the act of rape and abuse of this precious gender. Again, silence is not golden. Together, we shall end gender abuse.”
In a related development, some stakeholders, who converged on Lagos at the second annual Blossom Career and Entrepreneurship Summit, expressed similar concern on the vice that had pervaded the nation’s education system. The Chairman, Independent Corrupt practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Ekpo Nta, in his lead presentation at the event, made shocking revelations of fraud in the nation’s ivory towers.
While discussing the topic, Education Fraud In Nigeria: Character, Consequences And Panacea, the ICPC Chairman, who was represented by the Director, Public Enlightenment of the commission, Mrs Rasheedat Okoduwa, said the pervasive corruption in Nigerian society had crept into the academic environment, citing reports of embezzlement and misappropriation of the resources allocated to the sector.
The ICPC boss said the findings of the commission in its watershed collaboration with the National Universities Commission (NUC) on a study and review of the university system in Nigeria, exposed a can of worms. The exercise, tagged ‘Universities Systems Study and Review’ (USSR) commenced in 2012 and was concluded in 2013.
An avalanche of public comments and complaints against the university system, he said, triggered the investigation. The ICPC invoked its powers under Section 6 (b – d) of its enabling law to engage in a comprehensive study and review of the Nigerian university system. According to him, three universities were randomly selected for a pilot study: University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye and Salem University, Lokoja as samples of federal, state and private universities, respectively.
“The justification for the study was ICPC’s concern for the quality of future leadership in the country in the face of blatant corrupt practices within the institutions that produce the immediate workforce,” he said.
He said the investigation revealed fraudulent activities such as financial inducement for admission, political influence on the admission process, exceeding carrying capacity and leakage of examination papers. Also uncovered were proofs of writing examination by proxy, sale of marks by lecturers for sexual and financial favours, producing project works for a fee, forgery of certificates and other credentials, plagiarism and fake citations by lecturers, manipulation of records and mismanagement of funds.
More shocking crime uncovered include: favouritism in appointments and promotions, misapplication of research funds, payment to ghost workers, diversion of internally generated funds, shady contract award processes, bribes to alter students’ results to higher grades or class of degree, among others.
“The problem of sexual harassment needs to be mentioned specifically. Hapless young ladies whose only offence is the fact of their gender are made to repeat classes and spend more years in school than their contemporaries because they refuse to give in to the libidinal urges of their lecturers”, he stated.
According to him, many a time, the harassment degenerates into rape. Quite pathetic was the fact that the victims of this gross abuse of power either give in out of frustration or eventually exit school with less than sterling performance because of the toll emotional despondency takes on their mental ability.
Aside these shortcomings, Nta lamented the illegal activities of non-accredited schools of higher learning, describing them as education fraud. In past years, ICPC shut down 69 illegal institutions and charged the proprietors to court. Undeterred by the clampdown, illegal degree-awarding mills – institutions without requisite registration and accreditation running tertiary education courses and awarding first, second and third degrees, have continued to spread their campuses in many places.
“Apart from extorting huge sums of money from unsuspecting Nigerians, these institutions are manned by unqualified personnel and operate in makeshift structures and poor environment that cannot qualify our youths for the award of a recognized university degree,” he said. “Graduates of these mills find their ways into NYSC camps at the end of which they are given fake discharge certificates,” he noted.
The ICPC Chairman further explained that the rot at the tertiary level of education has its roots in the lower levels of education where admission into secondary schools has been compromised, with parents actively complicit in the examination malpractice that plagues the secondary school exit examinations. He decried the menace of ‘Miracle Centres’, where candidates are assured of higher grades after paying huge sums of money.
“From the lower level schools to the ivory tower, environments that are meant to be the grooming grounds for society’s leaders and the strongholds of societal values, whose certificates bear testimony to the recipients’ worthiness in academics and character, these are the very same institutions that trade such testimonies for a mess of pottage or a roll in the hay,” he explained.
Consequences of Education Fraud on the Nation
The ICPC boss warned that fraud in education destroys present and future generations of Nigerians. The massive corruption in the use of the appropriation to the education sector, which had inhibited the sector from having the necessary infrastructural and material input, has also resulted in poor quality graduates.
He said the ICPC recovered billions of Naira meant for educational development in the country, which had been diverted by corrupt officials at the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC). Further to that exercise, the Commission also worked recently with the State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEBs) for the same purpose. However, he did not give further details.
While analysing the effect of education fraud, he said the corruption ravaging the education sector had resulted to poor performance of universities as shown in the 2015/2016 Times Higher Education World University Rankings in which only the University of Ibadan was ranked in the world’s top 800 universities. The university was placed at 601st position, a far distance from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, which took 120th position.
The ICPC boss said the negative implication of such fraud tells on the poor quality of education received by Nigerian youths. He noted that when lecturers do not have research grants and current materials, the content of their teaching suffers. According to him, lecturers like everyone else, are products of their exposure and experience and can only pass on what they know, archaic and unresponsive as that knowledge may be, to current developmental and labour market demands.
“When school pupils are subjected to sub-human learning conditions under little shade in open fields, when 500 students cram into a lecture room built to sit 200, how much learning can take place?”
To deepen the injury to the nation, he said those who even graduate from the not-fit-for-purpose course curricula, cannot even give a credible performance in their area of certification because of the compromised processes through which such certification was obtained. His words: “The danger to the nation is manifest in the half-baked professionals that the system churns out; doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and engineers, who murder innocent citizens through crass incompetence. What about the teachers, those who will teach the coming generations? Let’s project our vision to say 50, 100 years from now and evaluate the impact of teachers whose declared proficiency is not worth the paper on which their certificate is printed.”
Another destructive consequence, he argued, was the fact that a corrupt context where grades are bought for money or sexual favours keeps producing indolent and immoral students who believe in the mirage of short cuts to success. These depraved youths become steeped in the mindset that everything can be bought in Nigeria, he said.
“This issue is also quite damaging to the collective ethos. When those youths who struggle to earn their degrees see others get away with fraud, they begin to question their own orientation and their moral anchorage is threatened. When they get into the larger society and are assailed by corrupt practices, they begin to think ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’; thus we would have created a society of morally bankrupt citizens for whom the end always justifies the means.”
Nta stressed that corrupt activities in the education sector also compound the injustice in society and the attendant consequences. According to him, when admission into institutions is sold to the highest bidder, access could be denied those who should rightfully be in school, the brightest and best of the nation.
“When students are frustrated out of school for not being able to ‘sort’ their way through, we create unwilling drop-outs who carry deep-seated resentment against society and merely await the opportunity to vent their anger.”
On the international scene, the ICPC boss said fraud in Nigerian educational system simply creates low credibility and rating for our products. “We shortchange our youths and take away their confidence when we cripple their abilities to compete with their mates in other climes. Yet we have seen the same Nigerian youths outperform the best overseas when given the benefit of a sound educational system,” he maintained.
To prove that the best could come from Nigeria, he expressed joy over the recent feat of Nigerian students at the 148th Commencement Convocation of Howard University, Washington DC. So also was the case of Dr. Victor Olalusi who in 2013 scored a perfect 5.0 Cumulative Grade Point Average in Clinical Sciences in Russian National Research Medical University, Moscow, arguably the first in the world! Last year, 19-year-old Evance Ochuko Ivwurie Jnr emerged the youngest ever First Class graduate in the 166-year-existence of Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Way Forward
The anti-corruption czar called for a sustained ethical re-orientation in the education sector as well as the larger society, noting that a value-based education constitutes an effective means of combating social ills. He said the ICPC, with the technical assistance of the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), developed a National Values Curriculum (NVC) and infused ethical issues into subjects across all levels of education in the country. The infused subject curricula (English Studies, Business Studies, Christian Religious Studies, Islamic Religious Studies, Social Studies, Book Keeping and Accounts, History, Food and Nutrition) have been in use at Basic and Post-Basic education levels since 2008. At the College of Education level, the NVC exists in General Studies, General Education, English Studies, Early Childhood Care and Education, Islamic Studies, Christian Religious Studies, Cultural and Creative Arts, Primary Education Studies, Social Studies and Integrated Science.
He said the Commission also developed a Teacher’s Guide on the NVC to aid the teaching of the curriculum to be more an experiential activity than academic. He stressed the need for complementing the effort by state governments, ensuring that the infused subject curricula and guide are available in all schools.
To complement classroom teaching, he said the ICPC established Anti-corruption Clubs and Anti-corruption Vanguards in schools and tertiary institutions respectively. In addition, there are Anti-corruption Community Development Groups established in collaboration with the National Youth Service Corps. There is also the ICPC National Anti-corruption Volunteer Corps, which is a mobilization platform for all Nigerians for life-long commitment to the anti-corruption crusade.
Nta emphasised the need for enforcement of rules and sanctions for breaches. Across the various levels of the educational sector and in the regulatory institutions, it is critical that leadership continues to display the courage and determination to sanction those that breach rules and procedures, he advised. “This is the only way that impunity can be reduced. To this end, ICPC would like to commend the University of Calabar, University of Ilorin and other institutions that have punished those with proven cases of fraud by way of plagiarism, certificate forgery, financial malpractice and admission through dubious means.”
He also called for the quick passage of the Sexual Harassment Bill and its uncompromising enforcement, which is currently before the National Assembly. He expressed hopes that the bill would be given expedited passage and purposefully enforced to deter such detestable behaviour on the part of students and lecturers.
“In the interim, ICPC encourages all higher institutions to emulate the University of Ibadan and develop their own local sexual harassment policy.”
Such measures, according to him, should include instituting mechanisms for transparency, accountability and integrity in the education sector. The Anti-corruption and Transparency Unit (ACTU) established by ICPC, in Ministries, Departments and Agencies across the country are designed to drive such mechanisms.
The unit, he said, could achieve this by monitoring all budgetary allocations to the sector, irrespective of the level of autonomy each institution or agency has. “As required by the Freedom of Information Act, the budget of each institution, its breakdown and application must be available to the public on their websites.”