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The cases of corruption in the education sector in Oyo State are ranging from reports of school administrators collecting money, students sitting mock exams, officials asking for grants from principals before distributing the school materials the government purchased for students to receiving money from teachers to deploy them to preferred areas. The governor announced that dismissal and prosecution awaited anyone who sabotaged government efforts through corrupt practices.

According to Transparency International, 66 per cent of the money Nigerian governments allocate to education is stolen by corrupt officials. Resource misallocation, corrupt procurement, exchange of sex for grades, examination malpractices, fake qualifications, teacher absenteeism, and corrupt recruitment practices are just some examples of the challenges the education systems is facing. This affects the quality of education, inclusion and learning outcomes with devastating consequences for national economic growth.

A recent report by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has unearthed the rot in many of Nigeria’s higher institutions, highlighting an intricate collusion among staff, students and other stakeholders. In the report titled, ‘Stealing the future: How federal universities in Nigeria have been stripped apart by corruption’, SERAP claimed that many allegations of corruption in federal universities – such as unfair allocation of grades; contract inflation; truncation of staff’s salary on the payroll; employment of unqualified staff; examination malpractice; sexual harassment; and issuance of results for expelled student to graduate have not been thoroughly investigated.

The Kaduna State government has uncovered about 33 phony primary schools in some local government areas. The fake schools were detected during the first phase of biometric verification exercise of state employees ordered by the Governor. The government, which pays about N3 billion monthly as salaries and allowances to its employees, was said to have saved N120 million from fake employee disbursements in the first phase of the exercise.

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has announced the existence of no fewer than forty-one illegal universities. These institutions have existed for years and fleeced unsuspecting members of the public of their hard earned resources in the guise of providing them with higher education.

The West African Examinations Council says it has not recorded any case of examination leakage in five years. It also denied knowledge of the existence of "special exam centers". The centers were allegedly created by some principals and secondary school proprietors for their candidates who are compelled to pay fees higher than the official fees charged by WAEC. The money is reportedly used for lobbying officials of the council to release the examination question papers to the centers ahead of the official time of the examination.