Politicians, pastors and diploma mills

This week, in a ground-breaking case, the court cracked on diploma mills. The Lilongwe Principal Resident Magistrate Court convicted and fined Tuweh Gadama for operating a university illegally.

The ruling is set to change the craving for and habit of illegally acquiring high-sounding academic and professional titles mostly by politicians, pastors and musicians in this country.

To avoid a four-year jail sentence he was slapped with, Gadama will most likely pay the fine of K3.4 million he was given as an alternative for the custodial sentence.

According to court documents, Gadama was operating universities called Cyprus Institute and Jerusalem University which were offering higher education qualifications without authority from the National Council for Higher Education (Nche). Gadama was charged and convicted of illegally running a university in line with Section 34(a) of the Nche Act and conferring a qualification granted by a higher education institution without authority of the council, in line with Section 34(b) of the Nche Act.

The list of those who have benefitted from the illegal institutions shows that a majority of them are politicians, Pentecostal pastors and musicians. Forgive my ignorance, but I have never come across a Roman Catholic, CCAP, SDA and Anglican fake PhD holder. But these other churches.

For starters, it is not a sin to crave for higher academic and professional qualifications and titles if you can earn them from accredited academic institutions.

If you have made solid and verifiable contributions to society, accredited higher learning institutions can spot you and if you are lucky, confer you with an honorary accolade be it a PhD or a professorship. We have so many such people in our midst. They commit no crime receiving the degrees. They deserve it.

But what has been happening during the past two decades is sickening, to say the least and an affront on the academia. You don’t earn an academic accolade by just walking into a shop and paying the tagged price as if you are buying oranges. But that is what diploma mills do. They dish out degrees—bachelors, masters, doctors of philosophy (PhDs) and professorships—depending on the fatness of your bank account and what you want the accolades for.

So, you may never have entered a university lecture room in your life, or read for a degree online or otherwise, but as long as you are willing to pay the prescribed price, you earn a PhD or Professorship.  And then overnight, you start demanding everyone to address you as Dr. or Professor so and so.

This is a mockery of the highest degree to human capital development and the pursuit of academic excellence which is earned through many years of rigorous reading, learning (and unlearning), teaching, research and publication. 

What would be the motivation for studying and working so hard to earn a higher academic qualification if someone next door—with no formal academic qualification—can get the same without sweating for them except by paying for it?

So, this is a good move by Nche for which the organisation should be commended. The proliferation of diploma mills in the country is a cancer that government through Nche has neglected for a long time.

In 2015, several well-known people in the country including politicians, pastors and musicians, received PhDs and other accolades from a well-known diploma mill. A list of such people has been trending on social media. Since then, so many people wanting to gain easy fame, honour, respect (and money) have flocked to these diploma mills and been helped accordingly. It is now time for Nche to crack the whip.

If the illegal universities have been committing a crime by awarding degrees against the Nche Act, it follows that the awardees are beneficiaries of proceeds of crime. And they are not few. We brush shoulders with them every day. Most of them have no shame flaunting their ill-earned titles and ‘qualifications’. Government has an obligation of flushing these fake certificates out of the system.

The diploma mills are crime enterprises; the holders of the certificates beneficiaries of proceeds of crime. They are taking advantage of the country’s high level of illiteracy as many people cannot tell a genuine holder of a PhD and a fake one like those we mostly see in Parliament and Pentecostal churches.