It was the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that first alerted Nigerians that a number of tertiary institutions have been aiding candidates to falsify records for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) mobilisation. “The board has discovered widespread and unwholesome practices whereby some institutions were colluding with candidates to falsify vital records, such as backdated year of entry and subsequent age adjustments, to enable participation of fake candidates” in the NYSC scheme, JAMB Director of Admissions, Mohammed Bolaji, wrote in a letter to vice-chancellors, provosts and registrars of tertiary institutions in the country. Then the NYSC authorities announced that the University of Calabar had mobilised more than a hundred fake graduates during the 2021, 2022 and 2023 Service Years. One happened to be a ‘bread seller’ who did not attend the university.

First, let me join the NYSC Director General, Brigadier General Ahmed in commending the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calabar, Professor Florence Obi, for her integrity on this issue. “It should be noted that it was the university management that exposed this criminal act and brought it to the attention of NYSC and other organisations, and not the other way round,” according to the university’s Registrar, Mr Gabriel Egbe who explained how it all started in September 2023, following discrepancies found on the list of graduates forwarded to the NYSC headquarters. “Not having these names in our graduation or mobilisation list clearly means that their certificates purportedly from our university are also fake.”

In October 2023, the University wrote to alert the NYSC and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) about its findings, seeking the arrest and prosecution of 11 ‘corps members’ who were, as of then, identified as impostors. The university also set up a committee to further investigate the matter, according to Egbe. It was this committee that discovered 167 fresh cases of criminal infiltration of the portal, making a total of 178 fake graduates. Meanwhile, the university was regularly briefing both the NYSC authorities and the ICPC of developments.

On this matter, authorities at the University of Calabar have taken the correct steps. The Data Entry Officer has been suspended and is currently under investigation by ICPC. We hope that the investigation will lead to the prosecution and conviction of all culprits involved. But there is need for a thorough house-cleaning. Not only by the University of Calabar but also by the entire educational sector in the country that has for long been associated with numerous unwholesome practices. That nobody is sure of the genuineness of the certificate being paraded by public office holders in our country is already becoming a problem for honest Nigerians at home and abroad. We are all tarred with the same brush due to the antics of a few unscrupulous individuals and their collaborators within the system.

In May this year, a monarch-elect in Ekiti State was sent to police detention by a Federal High Court sitting in Akure, Ondo State capital, over certificate forgery allegations. According to the charge sheet, the 48-year-old defendant was arraigned on a two-count charge of forging a certificate from the University of Ibadan with which he secured a job at the University Teaching Hospital, Ado-Ekiti in 2008. The Kabiyesi-to-be was also accused of forging his NYSC discharge certificate. So, the man who has been elected to be the custodian of culture and tradition of a community forged both University and NYSC discharge certificates to secure a job that would, 16 years later, make him eligible for the throne!

In November 2021, Mr Chima Igwe was arraigned by the ICPC. He had become the acting director-general of the Federal Institute of Industrial Research Oshodi (FIIRO) by presenting a forged PhD certificate, an ICPC investigator, Vera Esideme, told the Ikeja Special Offence court. “He did not actually obtain the certificate which he presented to FIIRO in 2002 which he used in getting to a level of a director and which also gave him the privilege of even being an acting DG of FIIRO,” Ms Esideme told the court in a long-running drama marred by politics.

In 2015, the Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) announced they had detected a fake medical doctor who had not only worked for nine years but had risen to Grade Level 13 in the ministry. The impostor had in fact worked in the Departments of Hospital Services and Health Planning Research and Statistics (HPRS) before he was eventually detected. According to the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, “Mr. Martins Ugwu Okpe who hails from Ogbadibo Local Council of Benue State got himself employed fraudulently using the stolen documents of his childhood friend and best man, Dr. George Davidson Daniel.” The statement from the ministry added: “Mr. Martins Ugwu Okpe was offered appointment by the commission on 30 August 2006 and was posted to the Federal Ministry of Health in September same year.”

The list of those who have risen to the top in various areas of our national life by presenting forged credentials is quite long. And the problem is compounded by ill-digested policies that are reeled out without considering their implications. With the recent decision by the federal government to set the minimum age for university admissions at 18 years, most of the students that entered schools five years ago are likely to complete their education before that age. Yet, at age 17, Oluwafemi Ositade recently secured admission with full scholarships to multiple Ivy League universities in the United States, including Harvard. Ositade, who achieved a perfect score in Mathematics (800/800) and a score of 760 out of 800 in reading and writing in the SAT examinations had also scored 358 and ranked the second best in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in Nigeria.

So, the obsession about the minimum age for university admission is as misplaced as other decisions of the current administration like reverting to the old national anthem. But the real concern now is that the policy on minimum age for university admission may already be pushing some Nigerians into forgery. JAMB has revealed “an alarming avalanche of obviously false affidavits and an upsurge of doctored upward age adjustments on NIN slips being submitted to upgrade recorded age” by students because of this policy. In as much as one should not excuse fraud of any kind, public officials can also not continue to dish out reckless policies without considering their implications.

At the annual teens career conference of my church, The Everlasting Arms Parish (TEAP) of the RCCG last Saturday, former Cross River State Governor, Mr Donald Duke alluded to this when he said: “Politics could be the most elevating vocation but a lot of quacks are involved in it, so they have brought it down to the lowest level. When politics is right, it elevates everything. It elevates medicine. It elevates your livelihood.”

Underlining the danger that impostors pose to the system, a former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed, lamented in April 2015 that “judges find it difficult to identify which counsel, appearing before them, is genuine or otherwise.” Although he was speaking at the inauguration of the special identification stamp for lawyers by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Justice Mohammed added: “Of even greater concern is the fact that members of the public are often left in a quandary over who they can place their trust, property and even lives in.”

When a society degenerates to that level, there is a serious problem. In his book, ‘Corruption and the Crisis of Values’ published in 2022, Daniel Agbiboa, an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, wrote that “while corruption exists in all polities, the form it takes, its extent, and its political and socio-economic functions vary enormously across time and place.” When people talk about corruption in Nigeria, he argues, what they often ignore is that it goes beyond paying and receiving bribes which are in themselves a consequence of the crisis of values in everyday life. The real challenge now is the absence of institutional integrity. And we must begin to deal with it.

In Nigeria today, our most sacrosanct institutions have been invaded by a national culture of fraud. In religion, charlatans have crowned themselves Pastors, Bishops, Imams, General Overseers etc. In the judiciary, judges can’t tell who a real counsel is. In the hospitals, patients are at the mercy of fake doctors and pharmacists whose prescriptions are often fatal. In the construction industry, quacks have taken over, causing buildings to collapse after mere drizzle. In academia, illiterates parade all manner of titles with which they disseminate ignorance to unsuspecting students, in a manner similar to what one of my favourite comedians, ‘Brain Jotter’ does in his ‘classroom’.

However, the wellspring seems to be the political realm. Our leadership selection process at the party level settles for ‘anything’ and ‘anyhow’! We have ended up getting the public to elect crooks and fraudsters to critical offices in the land. In a moral no-man’s-land with neither standards nor measures, the present world of universal fraud appears logical. But we cannot continue like this. The basic institutions of society must reverse course through the kind of investigation that the University of Calabar initiated. Punishment for offenders must be unsparing and stiff. Proven fraudsters must be stripped of ill-gotten gains in addition to being jailed and disgraced.

Institutions, including universities, the NYSC, law schools, and professional associations must now embark on self-audits to fish out fraudulent practitioners. Above all, our political parties must adopt a more thorough leadership selection process.

The Fuel Subsidy Palaver

In a statement he personally signed on 20th May 2016, titled ‘Ending price fixing, the making of economic sense’, President Bola Tinubu (then in his capacity as the All Progressives Congress National Leader) said Nigeria had for decades operated an opaque oil sector susceptible to manipulations and structured in a way that allowed only a few people to feed fat on the misery of the people. “President (Muhammadu) Buhari, after carefully weighing the options, decided to do what is right. In an act of courage, he removed the oil subsidy, thereby freeing the downstream component of this strategic sector of the economy from the distortions of price fixing,” Tinubu wrote at a period Nigerians were first made to believe “subsidy was gone,” by the APC propaganda machine.

Given his position on the issue, I was not surprised that Tinubu would proclaim “subsidy is gone” during his inauguration speech on May 29 last year. But the moment the Naira was floated against the dollar and our national currency started dancing Buga, many of us knew that subsidy was back with a bang, despite all the misleading statements by government operatives. As it was in the past, the federal government covered up by allowing the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation Limited (NNPCL) to run the show in a manner that leaves little or no room for transparency and accountability.

In the process, the Federation Account has effectively become the federal government account, or more appropriately, NNPCL account—a clear infringement on the 1999 Constitution. But now, the time for pretence is over. According to a report in TheCable at the weekend, the president has approved the request of the NNPCL to use the 2023 dividends due to the federation to pay for petrol subsidy. He also approved the suspension of the payment of 2024 interim dividends to the federation in order to address the company’s cash flow problems arising from trillions of Naira being expended monthly to augment the cost of fuel to consumers.

Let me be clear here. I have long been an advocate of fuel subsidy removal. In fact, I did a most extensive work on subsidy payments in my 2014 online book, ‘The Verbatim Report: The Inside Story of the Fuel Subsidy Scam’. The 857-page report is on my web portal, olusegunadeniyi.com where interested readers can download by clicking on http://bit.ly/1EY9s80. But I believe that the Tinubu administration has done enormous damage with the manner it has implemented the policy together with the exchange rate. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. You don’t just wake up one morning to say you removed the subsidy,” former President Olusegun Obasanjo said recently while criticizing the cavalier manner the policy was implemented. “Because of inflation, the subsidy that we have removed is not gone. It has come back.”

To compound our problem, the queues are also back at the pump, while we expend scandalous amounts of money to fuel our vehicles!