The Minister of Education, Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa, CON, has warned heads of tertiary institutions against manipulating accreditation exercises, declaring that officials found compromising standards risk losing their jobs, while private institutions could have their operating licences withdrawn.

Alausa issued the warning on Wednesday in Abuja at the inauguration of the Ministerial Committee on Strengthening the Accreditation and Quality Assurance System for Tertiary Institutions.

The Minister said the Federal Government would no longer tolerate institutions that present inflated, misleading or temporary records of their academic capacity to secure accreditation.

He stressed that the quality of graduates produced by Nigerian tertiary institutions must reflect the standards prescribed by their respective regulatory agencies.

According to him, the consequences of weak accreditation are already being felt in the labour market, where employers struggle to find adequately qualified graduates despite large numbers of applicants.

“People say they want to hire engineers. They will have 500 candidates, but they wouldn’t be able to get two, three, four or five qualified applicants. That’s the damage we’re doing to this university.

“But guess what? This Ministry of Education is not going to let this continue,” Alausa said.

He warned that institutions and officials involved in accreditation malpractice would face consequences.

“You will lose your job if you don’t act on time. Private institutions will lose their licences,” he declared.

Alausa also announced plans to end the practice of institutions temporarily borrowing academic staff, equipment, laboratories, workshops and other facilities from other institutions to meet accreditation requirements.

He said accreditation must reflect an institution’s genuine, functional and sustainable capacity, rather than a temporary arrangement put together solely for the arrival of an accreditation team.

“An institution should not be able to prepare a temporary picture of itself simply for the purpose of an accreditation visit. Sadly, this is what persists in the majority of instances,” he said.

The Minister said the new measures would address the temporary movement or presentation of academic and non-academic personnel, laboratory equipment, workshop resources, library materials and other facilities for accreditation purposes.

He insisted that whatever an accreditation team verifies must genuinely belong to, be accessible to and remain available within the institution.

The Minister’s position comes against the backdrop of controversy surrounding the accreditation of the Law programme at Atiba University, Oyo State.

In August, the Council of Legal Education imposed a 10-year moratorium on the university’s Law programme, citing inadequate facilities and the admission and graduation of students without the requisite approval.

The development has left affected students and their parents seeking government intervention, including possible transfers to accredited Law faculties, to prevent the loss of years of academic work and financial investment.

Alausa said the Federal Government was seeking to transform accreditation across universities, polytechnics and colleges of education into a more credible, transparent, technology-driven and continuously verifiable process.

He said the National Universities Commission (NUC), National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) and National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) had critical roles to play in protecting the integrity of the tertiary education system.

“An institution should not meet prescribed standards only when the NUC, NBTE or NCCE accreditation team is expected to visit. Those standards should be met every day of the year,” he said.

According to him, a robust digital accreditation platform would allow regulators to continuously maintain and periodically verify information on institutional staffing, facilities, laboratories, workshops and equipment.

He said physical accreditation visits would remain necessary but should increasingly be used to validate reliable digital records rather than begin the verification process from scratch.

The Minister directed the committee to develop mechanisms for verifying the authenticity and continuous availability of staff presented for accreditation, as well as the ownership, functionality, adequacy, accessibility and sustained availability of institutional facilities and equipment.

He also advocated the deployment of geospatial mapping, geotagging and digital identification technologies to authenticate physical infrastructure, laboratories, workshops and major equipment.

“Critical equipment presented for accreditation should be capable of being digitally identified and linked to a specific institution and physical location,” he said.

Alausa further called for a comprehensive digital identity and staff verification framework to establish the identity, presence and institutional affiliation of personnel presented for accreditation.

He said the framework should, subject to relevant laws and data protection requirements, leverage national identity infrastructure and interoperable government databases.

The Minister said collaboration with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) should be explored to utilise the National Identification Number (NIN), alongside appropriate use of Bank Verification Number (BVN) infrastructure and other secure technologies.

He said the system would help establish the principle of “one individual, one verifiable identity and an accurately declared institutional affiliation”, while detecting instances where an individual is improperly presented as full-time staff by multiple institutions.

The Minister also raised concerns over illegal admissions into tertiary institutions, saying the number of students affected had reached hundreds of thousands.

He attributed the problem partly to the tolerance of irregularities under previous administrations but assured Nigerians that the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration would no longer allow such practices to continue.

Alausa said the accreditation reform was not intended to weaken the existing system but to make it more transparent, evidence-based, efficient and difficult to manipulate.

Responding, the Chairman of the Ministerial Committee and former Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, pledged the committee’s commitment to tackling abuses in the accreditation process.

Oloyede said accreditation should not be treated as an exercise for which institutions temporarily prepare, stressing that continuous monitoring was essential to ensuring that standards were maintained throughout the year.

He said the committee would also examine ways of integrating the accreditation processes of regulatory and professional bodies to prevent situations where students complete programmes but are subsequently unable to proceed to professional training or registration.

Earlier, the Director of Polytechnic Education in the Ministry, Mrs. Kalau Igwe, said the committee’s inauguration demonstrated the government’s commitment to building a more transparent and integrity-driven accreditation system.

Igwe noted that the practice of borrowing or temporarily moving staff, resources and facilities for accreditation was not restricted to universities but also occurred in other tertiary institutions.

She expressed optimism that the committee would help establish a credible accreditation framework capable of improving educational standards and protecting the interests of Nigerian students.

The committee is expected to review existing accreditation policies, standards, guidelines, procedures and operational practices across the tertiary education regulatory framework.

It will also identify loopholes undermining accreditation, strengthen staff and resource verification, and improve the independence, transparency and accountability of accreditation panels.