The University of Ilorin’s flagrant violation of the assigned admission quota for Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) has left close to 50 graduates stranded and unable to be inducted into the medical profession six months after graduating.
At least 44 MBBS graduates of the university are still waiting without a date for induction or enrolment for their housemanship or the National Youth Service (NYSC), as the university fails to present them to the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) for induction.
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The MDCN approved a maximum of 150 as the admission quota for the MBBS programme at the university. However, UNILORIN violated this quota and admitted over 200 students into the programme in 2017, and is now concealing its violation from the MDCN.
The MDCN is the regulatory body for the training of medical practitioners, including doctors and dentists.
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The body accredits universities and allocates admissions quotas based on their ability to train medical practitioners.
After graduating from their respective universities, medical doctors cannot practice until they’re inducted into the profession by the MDCN.
Last year, 194 medical students at UNILORIN met the requirements for the MBBS degree.
However, to conceal its quota violation, the university presented only 150 graduates to the MDCN for induction. The remaining 44 graduates have been stranded for close to six months without induction, housemanship or NYSC.
“Out of 194, 175 of us passed the exam in one sitting, but only 150 were inducted, leaving 25 of us. The 14 retook the exam and passed. So altogether, 44 of us are left,” one of the affected graduates told PREMIUM TIMES.
Meanwhile, the university has failed to act, despite protests and multiple meetings between affected graduates and the university’s College of Health Sciences, several students told our reporter.
The Provost of the College of Health Sciences, Biodun Sulyman, a professor, confirmed that the school violated its quota.
A statement by the university spokesperson, Kunle Akogun, quoted Mr Sulyman as saying the university is still advocating with the MDCN to induct the remaining graduates, but there has been no headway yet.
“What happened was that 194 students sat for the final MBBS examinations, out of whom 175 passed outrightly while 19 had resits,” Mr Sulyman said, according to the statement.
“We approached the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) to come and induct them. But we were reminded that they could only induct 150, which is our approved quota. We were told to rank them, and the first 150 of the 170 were inducted in November last year.”
The university also said the government’s recent announcement to increase the quota for medical students has yet to be implemented. However, this was only announced last year, but UNILORIN’s violation happened close to a decade ago.
Some students who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES said the violation did not stop in 2017, as students admitted in 2018 exceeded 200, more than the existing quota of 150.
Ranking for Induction
On Friday, 14 November, UNILORIN inducted 150 medical doctors into the profession, and the vice-chancellor, Wahab Egbewole, a professor, described them as the ‘golden set’.
To select the inducted graduates, the university ranked them and selected the top 150, an unprecedented move that infuriated the graduates.
When the plans to rank them were first unveiled in October, the entire class began writing a petition against the school, but soon withdrew it out of fear of victimisation, another affected graduate told this newspaper.
“The class withdrew the petition so they don’t go down with us,” the graduate, who didn’t want to be named, told our reporter. “The school has pulled a fast one on us.”
The students decried that a six-year course, which turned into an eight-year programme due to industrial actions by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the COVID-19 pandemic, is now being further elongated.
Failed promise
A week after the induction, some of the graduates met with the provost of the College of Health Sciences, Mr Sulyman, a professor, to register their discontent.
Mr Sulyman promised them he would discuss it with the MDCN and that their induction would be in six to eight weeks, one graduate said.
“When we calculated six to eight weeks, the eight weeks were the second week of January,” the graduate said. “We were hoping that by the second week of January, we would be doing our induction, and that was the last time we had a physical meeting with the provost.”
When they texted the provost after the eight weeks, he gave multiple excuses: “that the MDCN Registrar was not picking up his call and that the registrar is saying our quota is too much.”
A culture of impunity
Meanwhile, Nigerian universities routinely admit beyond the quotas set by professional bodies such as the MDCN and the Council for Legal Education (CLE), leaving students to bear the brunt.
Last year, the MDCN refused to induct over 300 graduates of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Calabar (UNICAL) due to the university’s admission of students beyond its allocated quota.
In 2023, the CLE, the regulatory body for law education in Nigeria, imposed a five-year ban on the admission of students to the law faculty of Baze University, citing a breach of strict admission rules.
The Director-General, Nigerian Law School (NLS), Isa Chiroma, a professor, noted at the time that the university had consistently exceeded its admission quota, with the faculty now having a backlog of over 347 students waiting to be admitted into the Nigerian Law School.
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