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Abuja - The British High Commission on Wednesday said the lack of standards in administrative procedures by most universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education was responsible for its denial of many students the visas to study in UK. The commission gave the number of student applications for visas in Abuja as almost 60,000 in 2007, while Lagos was said to have a higher number in the same year.
The Verification Officer of the British High Commission, Mrs. Esther Samuel, and the Entry Clearance Forgery Officer, Mr. Coran Oakley, both confirmed that the situation had become a ‘nightmare’ to the commission.
Samuel said a situation where universities in Nigeria did not have a standard procedure for signing documents or processing information on students had led to so much forgery of documents within the system.
Consequently, she said the situation had led the commission to turn down thousands on student visa requests, including possible genuine ones, because it was unable to get who were the authorized officers to sign documents for students of some institutions. Samuel lamented that the situation was worse with the polytechnics and colleges of education where there were no formats for documents and certificates from most of them.
She said, “Now, our system of assessing student visas is based on documents. So, to confirm the authenticities of those documents is very imperative. We have tried to establish contact with the universities and polytechnics, but honestly it has been very difficult and frustrating”.
Some universities have good email contact and have written back to us to confirm the genuineness or otherwise of some students’ documents. But, in many cases it is impossible.
“The main headache is from documents we get from polytechnics and colleges of education. They are a nightmare. There are no standard format for the certificates and no security features on all the certificates. Anybody can fake them and bring to us. This has led to refusal of some probable genuine students visas.â€
Source: The Punch
2 responses so far ↓
1 Adebayo Olatunji Stephen
// Mar 17, 2008 at 8:20 am
Dear Commissioner,
with all due respect,i think the onus of proving the authenticity and or genuiness of a document lies strictly on the commission by virtue of the principle of ”he who assert must prove”.
In the light of this,the commission should not push that responsibilities to the schools or institutions an applicant attended.
In the same vein,where there is any attempt of doubting the authencticity of a document,it must be based on facts and not probabilities.This is because it could be quite frustrating where genuine students are refused and denied visas while fraudsters and criminal-minded applicants are granted.
I therefore humbly submit that where necessary,applicants should be invited for interviews
Thank you
2 ochuko atake
// Jun 12, 2008 at 9:17 am
thank God they’ve acknowledged that they turn down genuine applicant which is very bad.Nigeria is not a country of only rogue and forgery experts,we’ve got good folks.they should not forget that we were colonized by Britain,the same cannot be said of France and her former colonies.
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