A retired Permanent Secretary in the Enugu State Civil Service, Barr Peter Odo, has warned that incidents of forgery of school certificates and other qualifications will continue to be on the increase in Nigeria if the country does not arrest the current situation whereby holders of questionable qualifications are allowed into public offices.

Barr Odo, who is also the leader of the G-7 Revolution, an influential group in the Enugu State, was speaking against the backdrop of allegations of forgery of the result of the 2023 Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) by a secondary pupil in Anambra State, said although the matter is yet to be fully and properly investigated, the incidents of certificate forgery is likely to spike in the country, if the current situation where people alleged to have presented questionable qualifications are allowed into positions of leadership.

Lamenting the situations where the person sworn in as Nigeria’s president, and the one that was declared winner of the governorship election in Enugu State have pending issues of certificate forgery against them, Odo said the situation will have implications, not just on the credibility of our electoral systems, but also adversely impugn the integrity of Nigeria’s certifying and qualifying institutions.

Describing the situation affecting the Enugu-born Anambra student as sad, the legal practitioner regretted that years of erosion of confidence in our public institutions have created deep-rooted mistrust, and warned that unless confidence is restored through proper accountability, transparency, and integrity, Nigerians will continue to lose confidence on public institutions.

“This development is quite unfortunate. I am seeing the spirited way JAMB has been trying to defend itself following the barrage of attacks from Nigerians. This should not ordinarily be so. But like most public institutions, JAMB has lost the confidence and trust of the people. I am not sure that Nigerians have forgotten that it was in this same JAMB that we heard that a snake crawled into their cash till and swallowed billions of naira. That snake was never caught, and the person who possibly lied against the snake was never brought to justice,” he said.

Odo stated that developments similar to what happened in JAMB are prevalent in many public institutions and have given rise to the tendency for people to find ways of rigging the system, knowing that those who did the same in the past were rewarded rather than held accountable for their crimes.

“Look at the 2023 presidential elections, for instance. We have a situation where the Independent National Electoral Commission violated the Electoral Act in the use of BiVAs. Nigerians have been seeing evidence of mutilation of electoral material being presented at the tribunals. Sadly, the person for whose benefit INEC committed these infractions has allegations of certificate forgery hovering over him. He has several other allegations that should ordinarily make him withdraw from the presidential contest. The same is happening in Enugu State where the current governor has been accused of forging his NYSC discharge certificate.”

“Unfortunately, in the case of Enugu, the person being accused is attempting to seek refuge and get shelter from our courts. Our people have a saying that, ‘kid learns what plants to eat and how to eat them by looking at the mouth of its mother. Therefore, there is no way our children and young ones would not learn from these obviously bad examples, and that is why I fear that cases of forgery will increase in Nigeria unless effort is made to immediately restore public confidence in public institutions,” he said.