One morning in October, as dozens of new students mill around the makeshift, half-constructed main building of the fledgling Olympic University, waiting for their student orientation to begin, two police trucks screech up to the university gates, disgorging government officials and gun-toting riot police.
As the students scatter—some with dazed, uncomprehending expressions, others running toward the gates in a futile attempt to escape—Professor Michael Madukwe, an official of the National Universities Commission, a government body that regulates higher education in Nigeria, pleads with them to stop and listen.
“This is not a university!” he shouts. “This outfit never applied for registration or met any standard required of a university. Therefore, it is not recognized by the NUC. I will advise that you don’t come back here again.”
The early-morning raid is the latest chapter in Nigeria’s continuing struggle to wipe out institutions that purport to be genuine, degree-awarding universities but are in fact criminal rackets that operate without official recognition.
Degree mills, as these institutions are often called, have emerged as a growing concern across the world. But while similar dubious institutions in the United States and other developed countries tend to sell doctorates and other fake qualifications to adorn the names of lazy and dishonest professionals, their equivalents in Nigeria have amassed fortunes by preying on masses of desperate and disenfranchised students who fail to gain entrance into the legitimate systems each year.
The illegal universities that have mushroomed across Nigeria over the past decade, educators here say, are a symptom of deep troubles within the higher-education system and society at large.
In 1999, Nigeria emerged from more than three decades of political instability and military dictatorship with its once-proud universities in tatters.
Now the country’s recovery is threatened by rising unemployment and instability, heightened by its burgeoning youth population. More than two-thirds of Nigerians are under the age of 30 (and some 40 percent of the population is under 15), and many, except for the best-educated and most well-connected, find themselves shut out of the labor market.
The new civilian government has injected money into government universities and encouraged the formation of private colleges to help relieve the strain on the public system. But so far, those interventions have done little to absorb hundreds of thousands of young Nigerians desperate to go to college.
Of the million-plus high-school graduates who sit for university entrance examinations each year, only 200,000 find a spot at one of the country’s 96 federal, state, or private universities.
In the vacuum, unwanted and illegitimate “universities” such as Olympic have proliferated as shady companions to all the expansion and liberalization in the legitimate sector.
Nigeria is by no means the only African country to be plagued by bogus universities. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda all face similar scourges, and have begun a regional collaboration to deal with the problem. And while Liberia, the Central African Republic and Chad have all housed international degree mills aimed at Western consumers, educators say they have also come across smaller, less conspicuous fly-by-nights in the region that prey on the local populace.
‘Wasting Our Resources’
What sets Nigeria apart from its neighbors, say the educators, is both the magnitude of the problem and the level of determination that the government has shown to stamp it out.
According to a list compiled and published regularly by the government, some 32 illegal universities are known to operate within the country, which is almost as many as the 34 legitimate private universities that the government has licensed. In addition, the government has already closed down seven illegal universities and is pursuing court cases against several more.
“As a developing country, we cannot afford to have illegal universities,” says Julius A. Okojie, executive secretary of the National Universities Commission. “We are wasting our resources. It’s a distraction from our focus. It’s called into question the integrity of the ones that have been approved.”
It is no secret that Nigeria suffers from an image problem—which many in government appear desperate to reverse. The country, rich in oil, should be wealthy but has been bogged down by decades of chronic corruption and economic mismanagement.
The civilian governments have taken some measures to clean up the system, and Nigeria has climbed from the bottom ranks of the yearly corruption index released by the watchdog group Transparency International, jumping ahead 27 places in one year to rank 121st out of 180 countries in 2008.
The failures within the university system starkly illustrate what is at stake. While Nigeria aims to break its way into the ranks of the top-20 global economies, its engines for growth—the federal universities—have been shuttered for three months because of staff strikes over poor salaries and underfinancing of the system (The other public system of state universities, which are distinct from the federal university system, remains unaffected). The government and the academic staff union signed an agreement on October 21 ending the strike, but classes have yet to resume. Thousands of students who should be attending classes are instead sitting idle at home.
Frustration and Anger
“Young people are frustrated by the system,” says Kole A. Shettima, director of the MacArthur Foundation in Nigeria. “They go to school and come out with a certificate, and that certificate doesn’t give them anything. They don’t get jobs. They get frustrated because they spend all those years in the university system, but then they realize that there’s no hope and no opportunity for them.”
For many, the continuing strikes have brought such feelings to a head.
“Our parents struggled to bring us a good life because they could not stand up to their leaders in their time. And now our leaders’ kids are going abroad while we stay here and suffer,” laments Kikelomo Taiwo, a second-year sociology student at the University of Abuja. “And we are privileged,” and lucky to find a spot at university at all.
While those inside the system languish, those trapped outside vent their rage. The lack of opportunity, Mr. Shettima and others argue, has helped perpetuate conflict in the underdeveloped but oil-rich Niger Delta region, as well as in the north, where young Islamic militants chanting slogans against Western education clashed with government troops in August, battles that resulted in some 700 deaths.
One of the staff unions’ contentions is that government, flush with oil revenue, should be able to channel adequate money to the universities.
However, the universities remain caught in a vicious cycle, their growth constrained by the three interconnected limiting factors of access, quality, and money, says Olabisi Bamiro, vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan, the country’s oldest and most prestigious university.
Simply put, the system has too few professors, funds, and places for students. New universities poach the staff members of existing ones, spreading the available pool ever thinner. “Every time they create a new university, I lose some staff,” sighs Mr. Bamiro.
The bottleneck could be one of the major factors driving students to the illegal universities.
“Even students who are in regular universities that are licensed sometimes get tempted to go to the illegal universities when they see these other universities move faster,” says Nathaniel Naanlong Balla, a third-year student in counseling at the University of Jos.
Some of the illegal institutions actually hold classes, often taught in the evenings and over weekends by moonlighting professors from nearby universities. Often their teaching is cursory, or they don’t show up for classes because of teaching engagements elsewhere, students say. Facilities tend to be ramshackle, sometimes even with open-air classrooms.
Several of the students interviewed at Olympic University said that they had come here only after repeatedly failing to gain entrance into any of the country’s 96 recognized federal, state, and private universities.
“Admission has been frustrating,” says Esther Azuka, a 21-year old student who says she took and passed the entrance exams several times but never secured a spot in a recognized university, so decided to register for a degree in nursing sciences at Olympic.
While some students are deceived by the illegal universities—particularly those from rural areas—officials say students often realize what they are getting themselves into.
“As long as there’s this issue of access, we will have them,” says Mr. Okojie. “Students still go hoping to obtain a certificate that will deceive somebody, somewhere.”
Wasting Time and Money
Mr. Okojie makes regular appearances on television to urge students and parents against illegal universities, and the universities commission regularly publishes updated lists of the illegal ones. But the onus is still on students and parents to check.
The end result, for those students not simply looking for shortcuts, is that thousands waste time and money earning degrees that they find out are worthless only once it is too late. A National Youth Service Corps program—a yearlong service that is required of all graduates—admits only graduates of licensed universities. And no employer will hire a graduate who has not completed the service, Mr. Okojie says.
“The life span I see for any illegal university is four years,” says Peter Okebukola, his predecessor at the universities commission, who started the government’s crackdown on illegal universities. “After four years, that university will be burned down by the candidates that are duped.”
When officials have specific information about illegal campuses, as was the case for Olympic University in Nsukka, they move in and close them down, often enlisting the help of the secret service and the police.
More often than not, however, information is sketchy and incomplete. Proprietors print up fliers and leave them in sports halls and youth centers frequented by young people. The universities often change their names and locations by the time officials get wind of them, says Moses Awe, who heads the universities commission’s committee for the closure of illegal institutions.
While some outfits take in thousands of students and operate for years under various guises, he says, others consist of nothing more than a rented office or hotel room. They collect registration fees from prospective students and then simply disappear before anyone is the wiser—often to open shop under a different name elsewhere.
The common denominator, Mr. Awe says, is that all the proprietors of these institutions are outright criminals.
“The issue is greed,” he says. “People just want to make money. Often they themselves have defective educational backgrounds. They know that if they come to us, they will not be licensed.”
A Stroke of Luck
Tracking down these institutions, more often than not, depends on tip-offs from wary students, phone calls from banks checking up on operators who apply to open accounts, or other strokes of luck.
For instance, the Open International University, which says it has ties to an institution in Sri Lanka, was outed this year by a letter written by the national pharmaceutical council, complaining to the universities commission that Open International was using unapproved private clinics as teaching hospitals for its students.
In the case of Olympic University, in Nsukka, the raid happened thanks to a curious lawyer named Lawrence Ogbu, who noticed a roadside banner advertising the new university and decided to investigate.
His suspicions were raised, he says, when he spotted a young man in an Internet cafe typing a document on Olympic University letterhead. When he questioned the man, who identified himself as the chief promoter of the university, about his plans and whether the university was accredited, he says, the man was evasive but took his number and promised to phone him back later—and did not.
Asking around some more, Mr. Ogbu says, he learned that the proprietor also ran a private nursery school, and had previously been sacked from a nearby seminary for being a “dubious character.”
Then he went to visit the campus, on the outskirts of the city. “‘Olympic University’ was written on the gates,” he recalls. “I met these people in a makeshift office, in a half-constructed, abandoned building. They told me it was a temporary site.”
On a notice board outside, he counted the names of more than 300 students, registered for subjects like accounting and engineering, under the heading “First Badge of Students.”
“I thought, ‘badge?’ At a university?” he recalls. So he paid a visit to the universities commission in Abuja, the national capital, and alerted the authorities to the presence of a new illegal university.
During the raid, officials failed to nab the proprietor but arrested the registrar, a retired staff member from the nearby, and legitimate, University of Nigeria Nsukka; seized records; and took students away for questioning.
The action follows another success this year, when authorities raided and closed down two other campuses, filming the operation and broadcasting it on television. The hope, says Mr. Awe, is to use publicity to dissuade students from attending illegal universities. “If there is no demand, the business will die,” he says.
Despair Over Closures
Yet it is often the students themselves who refuse to denounce their proprietors or testify in court, complicating efforts to shut down the very institutions that victimize them, he admits.
In footage taken during the closure of Atlantic Intercontinental University, the first of the two institutions raided this year, in May, when officials gathered the students to formally announce the closure and to take questions, they encountered hostility.
While some students told officials to go away, others tried to explain that the institution was not actually offering degrees—an explanation that the proprietors would have coached them to give, Mr. Awe says. “Right now, I don’t even know if you are somebody who is in sheep’s clothing, or what,” said one young woman, glaring at the camera.
“They would have attacked us if not for the police,” says Mr. Awe.
At the second university, the Best Choice Institute, a ramshackle facility located on a rural palm-oil farm, students expressed shock as their dreams of obtaining university degrees were suddenly thwarted. “This is my life,” sobbed one woman. “Where are we going to go? Many of us have spent years and money in this illegal university. What am I going to do?”
