A member of the Imo State University Visitation Panel has said that the panel uncovered at least a case of certificate forgery during its investigation into malpractices in the university.
The panel, chaired by a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and former Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo, was inaugurated by the former Imo State Governor, Emeka Ihedioha.
The current Governor, Hope Uzodinma, however retained the vision for setting up the panel, which was to unearth abnormalities in the system.
A panel member who asked not to be named, said that if a certificate audit was conducted, a lot of lecturers might be affected because there was at least an instance of certificate forgery by a lecturer uncovered during the investigation.
“There are issues of certificate falsification, but the certificate audit may have to be done later. In fact, in at least one case, we recommended that a lecturer be sacked because of certificate falsification. I believe that if an audit is done, a certificate audit, many people will be affected. We didn’t have time to do a certificate audit because it is quite time consuming. We didn’t do that,” the source who was conversant with the matter said.
According to the source, the panel realised that there were petitions regarding the possibility that some people were using certificates they didn’t actually earn.
“The issue of age falsification was also very serious in the school. In fact, let us put this way, in the next several years, because of what we found out and because we have now insisted on putting the proper ages based on the time the people acquired their first school leaving certificates, the university would save more than N1 Billion in the next few years. If people retire when they are supposed to,the university would have saved up to N1 Billion, more than that actually,” he added.
