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Tales of corruption in Nigeria are many in number. One example is the case of the clerk at the state examinations board who was called to account for the disappearance of $100,000 in exam fees. An analyst of the country says: "There's this perception among officials in Nigeria that national government is there to divide up the booty of oil wealth." That political culture then filters through to layers below, to the point where even local police or school teachers or receptionists at public hospitals may consider it their right to demand bribes. "It's about people monetizing their position in society so that even people with the lowest amount of authority will use that to extract a small amount."

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

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 post-Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination or post- gives universities a second chance to screen prospective students who have come through the national matriculation examination system. Earlier this year, the Education Minister announced that the government had lifted a ban imposed in June 2016 on the post-UTME. But the Ministerwarned against institutions charging exorbitant fees for the exam and directed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board or JAMB to compile a list of institutions charging above NGN2,000 (US$5.50), according to a local media report.

A 23-year-old man, residing a stone's throw from Lyon, was arrested on Tuesday morning, 3 October, for trying to fool the higher education scholarship system. During the 2016-2017 school year, the young man had received government money based on the establishment he claimed to be attending the conditions he had declared. The problem was that the student had falsified his university registration document, and Crous, which manages student grants, came to realize it.