Search Page

Academic dishonesty including dissertation fraud is on rise universities in Africa. Only 24 African countries out of 54 have institutional repositories. This means that dissertations and other sources of information that can be plagiarised only exist in hard copies. According to a professor from Uganda, one way to eliminate contract writing is to establish a rigorous process throughout the dissertation writing and defence process. The president of the Southern African Students Union believes that paying lecturers decent salaries will lead to a decrease in the number of people engaging in ghost-writing for students.

Not only have Nigerian students been cheating from each other for years, but also the plagiarised academic work hasn’t been included in any global database. In a report, Nigeria's Vice-President announced the new EagleScan anti-plagiarism software would improve the quality of research, teaching and learning in Nigeria and West Africa. He promised that the government would ensure that anti-plagiarism measures were fully implemented in the country's institutions.

Nigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC) had discovered fake institutions in Benin awarding PhD degrees after students completed bogus studies in less than one year. According to NUC, academic projects and theses were sold for about NGN3,000 (about US$7.32) per copy, and sexual harassment was prevalent. Many of these fraudulent institutions are run by Nigerian proprietors who target students from Nigeria, where public universities struggle to accommodate a high number of qualified students seeking admission.

According to a professor from Nigeria’s Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), over 400 candidates seeking admission into higher education institutions across the country have been involved in admissions fraud. JAMB has discovered up to 96 cases of computer-based test irregularities in the North, with universities making changes to photographs and biometrics of candidates. This is contrary to a call by the Minister of Education who said institutions should not take any new photographs or biometrics of candidates after registration, in order to stop impersonations.

The Commissioner for Education, Science and Culture says there are three major kinds of corruption in the West Africa’s educational system: manipulation of girls, favouritism when it comes to admission into higher institutions and sex for marks. Young girls often fall prey to teachers, among others “who make the education sector the worst hit by corruption. A scholarship programme has been put in place in order to protect these young girls and strengthen the educational terrain.

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.

The quality of Nigerian university graduates continues to be a source of concern with many of the country’s academics and stakeholders pointing to the prevalence of plagiarism and academic dishonesty in universities as a contributing factor. Last month a specialist in development economics was reported to have said that 70% of graduates churned out in recent times by Nigerian universities and other higher institutions of learning were “unemployable”.

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.