Professional bodies encroaching on our accreditation mandate —NUC

THE National Universities Commission (NUC) has lamented that some professional bodies are encroaching on the mandate of the commission on accreditation and development of curriculum for degree awarding institutions in Nigeria.

Executive Secretary of the NUC, Professor Julius Okojie, speaking while receiving the members of the Federal House of Representatives’ Committee on Education on Tuesday, in Abuja, said this friction had created unhealthy development for university education’s growth in the country in terms quality assurance.

Nigerian Tribune gathered that professional bodies like the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) and the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council, among others, had been in conflict with NUC over accreditation and development of curriculum for some programmes run by universities in Nigeria.

Okojie, who was represented by the Deputy Executive Secretary, Administration, Mr Akinbode Agbaoye, said: “One of the biggest problems we have is that most of the professional bodies are competing with NUC.

“NUC has the sole responsibility of accrediting all degree programmes in Nigeria, but some of these professional bodies have gone beyond their mandate to concern themselves with programmes accreditation and curriculum development,” he said.

The NUC boss stressed that the mandate of the any professional body should be post-graduation.

“That is to say that when the fellow has graduated and you want to admit him into your profession; this should be when they should start regulating,” Okojie said.

He said unfortunately, some of the professional bodies had gone to the universities to harass them that they had to approve programmes for them and carry out curriculum review and “all the rest.”

Okojie also called for urgent review of the NUC regulatory framework, saying the NUC laws were weak and did not give the commission ground to be able to deal with people who infringed on the commission’s regulations.

He pointed out that under the current NUC legal framework, if somebody established an illegal institution, the only thing the NUC could do was to clampdown on that institution and then try to look on existing law of Nigeria to see how such a person could be prosecuted.

Besides, he pointed out that NUC wanted to have the power to criminalise some of the activities of the existing universities, especially as it regarded running of illegal and unaccredited programmes.

Okojie also told the lawmakers that delay in the release of budgetary allocation to the commission had hampered its ability to carry out programmes accreditation for the 2014, in line with its mandate of ensuring quality assurance, saying only N37 million had been released to the commission for overhead in 2014.

He maintained that this was grossly inadequate to carry programme accreditation.

On 2014 overhead, he said: “We have some challenges because have been experiencing releases in arrears for about three months on the average. We have received allocation up to the month of May only. We have not received fund for June, July and August.

“The greatest challenge we have right now is on how to carry out our quality assurance mandate regarding accreditation. If you look at our overhead, it cannot take care of our operations and at the same time allow us to carry out usually very expensive programmes accreditation, because a single exercise of accreditation will gulp about N400 million.

“Usually, programmes qualify at different times of the year. Some may be qualified from the beginning of the year, but we have not been able to carry out the accreditation because of delay in release of funds,” he said.

Okojie explained that it was only when the commission had a quantum of money that it could be able to embark on programme accreditation.

He said the commission had been scampering here and there to see how the programmes’ accreditation would be done “because it will set a very dangerous precedence if NUC is not been able to carry out accreditation.”

Okojie added that what this means was that people would graduate from programmes without due accreditation.

He, however, expressed hope that before the end of year, the commission should be able to carry out the accreditation.

NUC boss also raised the predicament of the commission on its inability to fund its Information and Technology Project, Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgREN), which he said had been the pride of Nigerian University System and one of its kind in Africa.

According to him, the payment for the bandwidth and subscription for the facilities being used there would soon been due and that this has not been budgeted for, even though President Goodluck Jonathan had, a few months ago, commissioned the project.
ADVERTISEMENTChairman of the House Committee on Education, Honourable Aminu Suleiman, in his remark, said this delay in the release of funds had impacted negatively on the performance of Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs).

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