The tragedy of certificate forgery

Certificate forgery, like examination malpractice, is another pandemic bedeviling the Nigerian educational system. And unless concrete steps are taken to tackle the menace, it could provide the fastest lane for the country to arrive at the port of destruction. Recently, a lecturer with the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi was in the news for […]

Certificate forgery, like examination malpractice, is another pandemic bedeviling the Nigerian educational system. And unless concrete steps are taken to tackle the menace, it could provide the fastest lane for the country to arrive at the port of destruction. Recently, a lecturer with the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi was in the news for certificate forgery. The fifty-one year old Daniel Ishola Owaodemi was discovered to have forged certificates to lecture at the ATBU Bauchi for the past twelve years. The appointment of a female lecturer with the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University Lapai in Niger state was, of late, also terminated for using a forged master’s degree certificate from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria to lecture at the institution.

We find some aspects of the case involving the ATBU lecturer mind-boggling; prompting several moral questions about our legal system and the efficiency of our university administrators. When the lecturer was charged to court, he pleaded guilty to the crime. Counsel to the accused, however, appealed to the presiding judge for leniency on grounds that “the accused is a pastor and a family man”. But in our opinion, those qualifications even justify further why the accused should receive stiffer penalties from the court because as a pastor, he is embarrassing his religion and church; and as a family man, he is laying a very bad precedence for his children. As a pastor and a breadwinner, we expected the court to deliver a judgment that would deter potential forgers from such a crime. Unfortunately, the accused was sentenced to one year imprisonment on the first count charge or pay a fine of N10, 000. 00. He was sentenced on the second count charge to one year imprisonment with an option of a fine of N20, 000. 00; and on the third count charge, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment or pay a fine of N30, 000.00. In summary, the accused was sentenced to a total of thirty years imprisonment with an option of a total fine of N60, 000. 00 only; an amount far below his monthly salary in the twelve years that he “duped” the ATBU, Bauchi. The judgment delivered by Chief Magistrate Isah Mohammed suggests that our courts, rather than reform offenders and deter potential criminals, are seemingly more interested in breeding certificate forgers.

We similarly find it incredible that the authorities of the ATBU Bauchi failed to discover the fake teacher until after twelve years. Apart from security symbols and seals, there are so many but easy ways of detecting forged certificates especially from foreign institutions. Things to look for in the bid to ascertain the genuineness of a certificate generally include the designation of the authority that signed the certificate as well as structure or chain of the expressions on the certificate. Even when the document passes these tests, university authorities and other employers of labor in the public and private sectors of the economy should as a matter of responsibility consider it worthwhile to contact issuing authorities to verify the authenticity of the certificate(s) presented to them. Any academic certificate from a foreign institution of learning that is without the official stamp of the host country’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Higher Education; as well as the seal of the Nigerian Embassy in the host country can be suspected to have been forged. The love for anything “foreign” described by my colleague Dr Farooq Kperogi as xenophobia, perhaps, accounts for the blind-folded mindset of those in charge of screening certificates.

I was invited, many years ago, by a private school in Abuja to help go through the files of all the academic staff on the school’s pay roll with a view to detecting (if any) fake results. In this exercise, I found eighteen out of the twenty-five files I examined to have one or more fake certificate or statements of results. The same situation, most likely, obtains today in many schools in the country. Certificate forgery is a phenomenon that has eaten in to nearly all professions in Nigeria including the medical profession, pharmacy, engineering, teaching, etc. However, the tragedy of certificate forgery in the teaching profession has devastating consequences on the society. A fake medical doctor may succeed in killing one patient at a time in the operating theater, but a fake teacher kills a whole generation of learners because of an erroneous knowledge passed to them during a lesson. There seems to be no level of education in the country at which certificate is not forged. With the kind of disinterested attitude of concerned authorities, only Allah knows how many exist in Nigeria today of fake teachers and lecturers, fake medical doctors, fake nurses, fake lawyers, fake engineers, fake pharmacists, fake architects, fake surveyors, fake accountants and bankers, fake auditors, fake tax administrators, fake journalists, fake soldiers and policemen, fake pensioners, and even fake Imams and fake pastors. Are we sure there are no fake husbands and wives in Nigeria? I remember a Nigerian was arrested in the United Kingdom last year for faking a marriage certificate in which he claimed to have married his daughter!

We are now faced with the problem of having wrong people occupying strategic positions; thereby alienating qualified Nigerians from being in such positions. This situation does not encourage productivity because a person cannot give what he does not have. In Nigeria today, you have ambassadors who cannot sing the national anthem; school principals and teachers who cannot speak correct English; legislators whose only contribution at plenary sessions is to second motions; professors who cannot graduate students with higher degrees; PhD holders who cannot publish papers in peer-reviewed journals; governors who ban journalists from covering their states in a manner that a farmer would ban tress-passers from his farm; simply because they do not know where their rights and privileges begin or end.

Part of the problem is the unnecessary emphasis on paper qualification to the neglect of the aptitude of individuals. Some sandwich, part-time and distance learning centres have been turned in to certificate hatcheries in the country. Acute unemployment cannot be isolated from the tragedy even though such must not be seen as a license to faking certificates.

In order to curb the menace, this column recommends that certificate audit or parade is carried out in all public and private establishments in the country. If commercial banks in the country could comply with the directive of the CBN to update accounts in all their branches throughout the country within a given period, we believe certificates can, by the same token, be authenticated. Government is also advised to establish an institution to be called “Educational and Academic Crimes Commission (EACC)” to fight certificate forgery, examination malpractice and allied offences. It is also important that the exclusive use of certificates for employment is de-emphasized. Applicants irrespective of their qualifications should be subjected to aptitude tests which results should determine their placement on a job. May Allah (SWT) guide us to do all that is necessary to tackle certificate forgery in order to guarantee a decent future and society in Nigeria, amin.