President Bola Tinubu has invoked provisions of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Act to approve a mandatory compliance with the national policy for the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank (NERD) as a requirement for mobilisation into or exemption from the scheme.
The compliance directive, which is in line with Sections 2(4)(4) and 16(1)(C) of the Act, was part of an enforcement circular recently issued by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume.
Akume conveyed the approval for the adjustment of “NYSC mobilisation criteria in accordance with the President’s regulation requiring proof of NERD Policy compliance for all prospective Corps members, regardless of where they were educated.”
Apart from provisions in the policy meant to check certificate racketeering and honours abuse, one of the new mandatory requirements of Nigerian students in the policy is the deposit of academic outputs, which include thesis or project reports.
In Section 6.1.23 of the policy, the requirement is designed “as a quality assurance check and as a yearly independent proof of continuous academic enrolment and affiliation” as it is expected to inviolably time-stamp scholarship, academic activities, and footprint regardless of location.
The SGF’s circular has now clarified a directive earlier issued by the Education Minister, Tunji Alausa, that effective from October 6, no Nigerian graduate – whether from a Nigerian university, polytechnic, college of education, or an overseas institution will henceforth be mobilised for or exempted from NYSC without proof of NERD compliance.
The step, it was learnt, is a masterstroke in safeguarding the nation’s intellectual assets while restoring credibility to academic processes and qualifications. The directive does not however affect serving corps members or those enrolled before the enforcement date.
A copy of the approved NERD policy showed that the President also approved an academic output monetisation and reward mechanism for students and their lecturers, which was proposed to the federal cabinet by Alausa to ensure students and lecturers can earn lifetime revenues from their academic deposits. The policy encourages each higher institution to set up its local repository.
Besides, the policy creates an illuminated pathway with a well-structured collaborative framework where the various autonomous institutions had hitherto operated in silos. The federal government’s circular to Ministries, Departments, Agencies (MDAs), and higher institutions of learning directs full enforcement of the NERD Policy.
In addition, critical data bodies, including the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), are to provide inter-organisation data exchange support via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to facilitate onboarding and data validation.
Underscoring the significance of the directive, spokesperson for NERD, Haula Galadima, explained that each item deposited by a student shall feature the full name of the student, and those of his supervisor, co-supervisor, if any, and that of the Head of Department (HoD), as well as the sponsoring institution and department.
She said: “Apart from the mandate to verify for authenticity as a national flagship, the NERD digitisation programme has a clear objective – to raise the bar in the quality of academic content, output and presentation nationwide.
“One way NERD intends to accomplish this task, based on its mandate, is to strengthen the supervision processes in the nation’s higher institutions without getting involved in the processes.
“If our eminent scholars are aware that their names will appear next to those of the students they supervise on a globally available digital platform, there is the likelihood that each lecturer would up his or her standard. Very few lecturers would want their names associated with poorly produced academic works. NERD is therefore poised to help each lecturer earn his ‘earned allowances’ by providing thorough supervision.”
The NERD Policy, it was learnt, is Nigeria’s answer to decades of intellectual waste. For too long, thousands of theses, dissertations, and research projects, with insights capable of transforming agriculture, medicine, engineering, and governance, have gathered dust in libraries, unorganised and untapped.
The NYSC will now serve as a quality assurance check to enhance national productivity with a legal mandate to ensure all graduates are contributors to the national pool of knowledge, it stated.
From March 30 each year, all organisations and higher institutions must now file annual compliance reports to NERD, enhancing monitoring and evaluation to ensure sustainability, continuity, and accountability
