By; Dr Kabiru Danladi Lawanti
The whole Cotonou degree is criminal and all those involved need to be fished out and punished. Some people might see us as harsh or maybe insensitive for saying this.
There are things we cannot say in public, but one needs not to be a prophet of doom to predict that Nigeria cannot withstand this onslaught and will eventually crash.
Our desperate quest for certification through whatever means led us to this situation. Parents are desperate to have their kids in the university, some even underage (we saw 15, 16 and 17 year olds being pushed to universities), whose mental capacity is too elementary to grasp or cope with challenges of university education.
The crises in higher education and the adoption of neo-liberal policies that have no place in a developing country like ours, also contributed to this confusion. Consequences of commodification of knowledge is enormous in a country with no strong institutions to checkmate excesses and greed of capitalists. The results is the proliferation of degree mills all over.
Adoption of neo-liberal policies means cutting funding for public services like education, health and sanitation. Nigerian public universities suffer from these policies. Funding was cut, citing many reasons. The results is restrictions in admissions. When you have many applying to enter university and the slots are few, universities have to admit based on quota. Therefore, few can be admitted.
Parents, in their desperate efforts to get their children into universities, started sending their kids to some African countries for bachelor’s degrees – Uganda, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Sudan, Niger Republic, etc.
Another reason is the dichotomy between degree and HND. Many people affected by stagnation in their places of work because of HND opted for a way to have a degree that can help them get promoted. Many went for the Cotonou degree. Since it is acceptable by MDAs, or they made it acceptable, most of them started trooping to these mushroom universities to obtain these degrees to get promoted.
Then we have people who can’t cope with rigorous nature of our public university system. I know a lot who not only failed exams, but are withdrawn from diploma programmes, but appear after 6 months with a degree from these degree milling centres. Others could not pass UTME and therefore unqualified to enter public universities. Cotonou degree provides an alternative.
The last, in my opinion, are those running from ASUU strike. Many parents justify purchasing the Cotonou degree because of the unending industrial disputes in the public universities.
I don’t want to talk about the “motor park gang” led by former minister of education Adamu Adamu and his National Universities Commission (NUC) executive secretary, who bastardised the university system for only God knows why. They have killed what remained of our public university system.
Lastly, some of our private universities are not any different from the “Cotonou universities”.
President Bola Tinubu needs to do a lot more to rescue the situation. I like the way Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman handles the situation. But sincerely, the students of these dubious universities, their agents, officials from Federal Ministry of Education, NUC and the other places need to be rounded up, arrested and punished according to our laws.
Dr Lawanti is a senior lecturer with Mass Communication Department, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and can be reached via kblondon2003@yahoo.com.
