The National Universities Commission (NUC) blamed the proliferation of illegal degree-awarding institutions on parents he said had placed a premium on university certification.

NUC’s acting executive secretary, Chris Maiyaki, said this in an interview on Sunday in Abuja.

He said unaccredited degree-awarding institutions and satellite campuses remained banned in the country.

Mr Maiyaki advised parents to thoroughly scrutinise institutions before sending their wards to acquire certificates.

“Everybody is right to pursue university education, but how you go about it is the crux of the matter.

“The challenge of access, the huge gap between supply and demand makes parents desperate about getting university education for their children, and this makes them vulnerable to greedy and fraudulent persons with commercial undertone,” he said.

Mr Maiyaki explained that a committee was set up to stamp out illegal institutions nationwide.

“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 on satellite campuses at that time,” Mr Maiyaki said.

He said the commission shut down the centres, maintaining that satellite campuses remained banned.

“We establish a committee on the closure of illegal universities, and we mandated it to identify, locate and prosecute those perpetrating illegalities, and we also do this in a multi-stakeholder collaboration involving security agencies,” he said.

He also said a committee was reconstituted in 2021 to identify and prosecute operators of illegal institutions, noting that the effort recorded a huge success. 

(NAN)