The Governing Board of Novelty Polytechnic, Kishi, Oyo State, has appealed to the National Board for Technical Education, NBTE, Kaduna, to shut down four illegal satellite campuses being operated by fraudsters in the name of the institution.
The board declared that there was no time the board or the management of the polytechnic applied to the NBTE to open such campuses, knowing fully well that both the Federal Ggovernment and the NBTE as the regulator of technical education in Nigeria do not allow the existence and operations of such centres.
The four disputed and controversial satellite campuses are located in Ibadan, Oyo State, Lagos, Abuja and Bida in Niger State.
A member of the governing board, Prince Lanre Ogundipe, at a press conference in Abuja at the weekend, maintained that Novelty Polytechnic, Kushi, has no satellite campuses anywhere in the world.
Ogundipe insisted that the three-year-old polytechnic does not have students outside it’s main campus in Kishi and equally does not affiliate any school or authorise any individual or body corporate to do so on its behalf.
Ogundipe, a former President of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, NUJ, said that apart from the eight departments duly accredited by NBTE for its over 400 students, the polytechnic neither run any illegal programme nor admit students into them.
He averred that the polytechnic, which took off three years ago with 83 students, admits students for only the Ordinary National Diploma, OND, for the duly accredited courses.
The clarification came against the backdrop of the September 2023 warning by the NBTE to close down Novelty Polytechnic for alleged infractions.
Prior to the NBTE warning, the board and management of the polytechnic had in April 2023 alone wrote four letters to NBTE, alerting it of the activities of a former canvasser for the school, who forged the signature of the proprietor, cloned the polytechnic’s portal to open the campuses and extort several admission seekers in the name of Novelty Polytechnic, Kishi.
He said that had the NBTE carried out due diligence and acted promptly on the activities of the sacked canvasser when alerted, the situation would have been salvaged.
Lamenting that before the illegal activities of the disengaged canvasser were discovered, he had defrauded the school of N50 million, Ogundipe added that the fraud was reported to the police, which led to the arrest and arraignment of the canvasser before a magistrate court and a High Court in Oyo State.
He insisted that the two cases are still pending before the two courts.
But, undaunted, Ogundipe said that the embattled and sacked canvasser engaged the services of some civil society organisations, CSOs, to write frivolous petitions against the polytechnic.
He therefore asked the NBTE to act fast by shutting down the four illegal campuses.
