The National Universities Commission (NUC) has blamed the proliferation of illegal degree-awarding institutions on parents whom he said had placed a premium on university certification.

The Acting Executive Secretary, Mr Chris Maiyaki, said this on Sunday in Abuja during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

He told NAN that unaccredited degree-awarding institutions and satellite campuses remained banned in the country.

He advised parents to thoroughly scrutinise institutions before sending their wards there to acquire certificates.

“Everybody is right to pursue university education but how you go about it is the crux of the matter.

“The challenge of access, the huge gap between supply and demand makes parents desperate about getting university education for their children and this makes them vulnerable to greedy and fraudulent persons with commercial undertone,” he said.

Maiyaki explained that a committee had however been set up to stamp out illegal institutions across the country.

“When we were challenged by this menace of our satellite campuses, NUC in 2000 undertook resource assessment of all outreach centres and we came up with the state of affairs of satellite campuses.

“We wrote to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and FEC was so gracious and there was a total ban on satellite campuses at that time.

“We took a step further at NUC and shut down these centres. So satellite campuses remain banned and outlawed.

“We established a committee on the closure of illegal universities and we mandated it to identify, locate and prosecute those perpetrating illegalities and we also do this in a multi-stakeholder collaboration involving security agencies,” he said.

He also said a committee was reconstituted in 2021 to identify and prosecute operators of illegal institutions, noting that the effort recorded a huge success.