A former vice chancellor of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) Bauchi, Abubakar Sambo, has praised the Nigerian government over the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank (NERD) programme.
October 6 has been fixed as the deadline for the enforcement of the NERD regulations.
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Mr Sambo, who is the Kaduna State Commissioner for Education, in a chat with journalists, said the President Bola Tinubu-led administration has through the scheme taken significant steps to eliminate education rackets, fake certificates, and for-profit honour scams.
Mr Sambo, who once served as the Director General of the Energy Commission, applauded the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, for implementing the NERD scheme.
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He especially praised the thesis digitisation and anti-certificate racketeering components of the programme, as well as the National Publication Indexing System for researchers.
“There is no responsible country in the world that will allow the integrity of its educational system to be crippled by doubts and refuse to provide the tools to guide the public and the industry.
“I am glad that the president appreciates the enormity of the problem. There are just too many hardworking Nigerians over the ages who deservedly earned their honours. At least, the nation must put systems in place to protect the sanctity of academic honours from being corrupted by a few bad eggs.
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“Even liberal societies like the United States of America will ensure there are clear ways to separate proper educational experience from the activities of degree mills. Hence, deploying the NERD’s computerised digital submissions and credential verification system as an academic progression watchdog is timely and commendable. Every sector needs sanity checks,” Mr Sambo said.
On the National Publication Indexing Service of NERD, the commissioner described the action of the Nigerian government as a “first-of-its-kind database in Africa”, stating that “there is no country in Africa that has thought this was important.
“Yet, production or generation of knowledge and being a participant in that sacred altar of global academic publishing should be inseparable.
“The government must continue to strongly give strategic support to these schemes. We have over 100 years of publishing gap between us and the Western world. Government must intentionally incentivise the private sector to be able to help us catch up.”
Mr Sambo further added that “not being a partaker over the past century constitutes a significant development impairment for African nations, because academic publishing not tethered to an African agenda would only promote 21st-century neo-colonialism.”
The commissioner said Kaduna State would promote the National Policy on NERD to ensure that higher institutions in the state embrace and comply with its regulations.
“We will be supporting this. Kaduna State and in particular Governor Uba Sani are irrevocably committed to the objective of improved education sector as an enabler of growth”.
The NERD programme is a special federation intervention programme approved by the Federal Executive Council in February.
In the Declaration of Effectiveness that was released by Mr Alausa in March to herald the programme, NERD is described as “a one-stop-shop for the national management, administration, and preservation of education data, records, documents and audio-visual assets of the nation.”
Apart from directly addressing the issue of certificate racketeering and abuse of honour or awards, the federal government also mandates students to submit copies of their project reports, theses, and dissertations in the national education database of NERD.
The directive applies to undergraduate and postgraduate students (PgD, Master’s, and PhD) anywhere in Nigeria, regardless of the institution’s ownership.
Changes have been approved to NYSC’s mobilisation regulations to ensure that only prospective participants who have complied with the NERD regulation on the deposit of academic output are mobilised or exempted.
The new NYSC requirement goes into effect on 6 October.
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The NERD Declaration of Effectiveness provides that “the NERD system is owned by all post-secondary schools in Nigeria and their corresponding regulatory authorities and library services through the Federal Ministry of Education” while Section 6.1.24 of the policy makes compliance obligatory wherein the President invoked his powers as enshrined in Sections 2(4)(4) and 16(1)(C) of the NYSC Act, Cap. N84, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004, to henceforth include compliance with the NERD Policy by a prospective Corps member as a prerequisite to NYSC mobilisation or exemption.
Similarly, the policy also mandates the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) to fund or refund only students who have complied with the NERD policy.
The Executive Director of Cybersecurity and Programme Communication for the NERD programme, Haula Galadima, recently confirmed that the various schemes on the NERD programme are ready and awaiting flag off.
She implored members of the public and, in particular, the academic community to acquaint themselves with the services on the NERD information portal at https://ned.gov.ng and enrol their focal persons at https://ned.gov.ng/onboarding in compliance with the directives of the federal government.
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