The Federal Government has vowed to blacklist any university, especially in African countries found to have issued or are issuing fake degrees to Nigerians.
The government said it would publish the list, so that Nigerian parents will not waste their resources sending their children to such institutions.
Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Sonny Echono, disclosed this in an interview in Abuja.
Echono noted that it was sad that African countries open and operate universities targeted at Nigerian students.
According to him, most of these institutions offer courses and programmes that are not accredited or recognised by the National Universities Commission, the regulatory body in Nigeria.
Echono said: “We are going to blacklist the schools that we know have issued fake and unwholesome degrees. Those ones are going to be blacklisted completely, regardless of the programmes they are doing by the Federal Government.
“We are going to make it public so that Nigerians do not waste resources sending their children to such schools. That is what we decided in our last meeting.
“We hear that some of these so-called universities operate in business centres in those countries. You go to a shopping mall you will see two campuses there all for Nigerian degrees. It is very sad.”
The permanent secretary disclosed that the government has set up a national committee to look into the illegal award of degrees to Nigerians by African countries.
He said: “We have activated a national committee on standard and curriculum. They are working on that. They are going to accredit not just approved programmes of even those coming from other countries because one of the trends we discovered was that some of those courses are not being offered in those countries. They are just targeted at Nigerians. Even in their own countries, they don’t run such programmes for their citizens.
“We have a platform that luckily Nigeria is chairing across Africa on uniform guidelines and minimum standard for the accreditation of programmes and for mobility of qualification so that if you finish from one school here you can go to another one in another country.
“You can even do one year here and continue in another country. Using that platform, we are subjecting all the programmes, their curriculum, their philosophy, their weighting, the duration and the number of credits to review,” he added.
