The Imo State University, Owerri, and an Abuja-based educational services company are embroiled in a satellite campus and university admission racket through which they tricked thousands of students into paying over N150 million in illegal fees, an investigation by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting has revealed.
The company, Diamond Lecture Centre, has for years operated an illegal satellite campus purportedly belonging to the Imo State University, in the process admitting and running classes for thousands of students in business and management-related courses.
The Diamond Lecture Centre charges each student N80,000 tuition fees and currently has  some 2,000 students in 100, 200, 300 and 400 levels, with the final year set currently taking their final examination.
However, the National Universities Commission, NUC, has declared that the campus, which operates out of the Festival Primary School, Area 10, Garki, Abuja, is illegal.
The commission said neither Imo State University nor Diamond Centre has any approval to run either a satellite or any other kind of campus in Abuja.
Not only that, the tertiary education regulatory body also says that any degree awarded to any students through such a bogus and illegal scheme would not only be illegal but would also not be usable to seek employment in Nigeria or anywhere in the world.
That leaves the fate of nearly 2,000 students who are currently on admission at the fake and illegal campus in the balance.
Interestingly and curiously too, authorities of the Imo State University have also disowned Diamond Centre and distanced itself from the satellite campus it claims it runs for it in Abuja. This is in spite of the fact that Diamond Centre uses the university’s course outline, handbooks, letterhead and stationeries in the admission and teaching of students.
Investigations by icirnigeria.org revealed that Diamond Centre has operated the illegal satellite campus in Abuja for many years and would have admitted up to 10,000 students by now.
Our investigations show that most of the students of the campus are professionals such as bankers, civil servants or business people who do not have the time to undertake the rigours of normal university education.
With lectures conducted only on Saturdays and Sundays, such cadre of professionals finds it convenient to run weekend programmes.
But there is nothing about the classes conducted by Diamond Centre that resembles anything close to a university education and even some of the students agree that granting degrees through such a process is an aberration.
First, the lectures are held in the most unsavory environment. When our reporter visited Festival Primary School, Area 10,Abuja, what he saw was shocking. Lectures were being held in decrepit, moldy, smelly classrooms with broken furniture and dilapidating walls.
Apart from this, posing as a student, monitoring the lectures and speaking to some of the students, our reporter found that the quality of teaching was abysmal.
The lecturers operated mainly a “handbook education” policy whereby they sold handbooks to students which they are supposed to read to pass examinations.
But the lecturers do not even bother to prepare their own notes but just download handouts from the websites of other educational establishments on the Internet. For example, the whole handbook on Analysis for Business, a course for 400 Management students, was downloaded entirely from the Internet with no input from the lecturer.

Many students who spoke to us argued that there is no way the satellite campus would have existed for years illegally without being closed down without collaboration of staff of the NUC and the university.
“I believe that some people in NUC and the Imo State University are in league with the director (Odunze) to scam students. Certainly they are in this together. They cannot claim ignorance. While driving some students away from the exam hall recently, Odunze told us that he just paid over N7 million to the Imo State University as examination fees,” an angry student said to our reporter.
Another student disclosed that Diamond Centre’s plan is to wind down the operation of the campus with the last intake of students who are now in 100 level. If this is true, even if it does not take in new students, as Mr. Odunze said, the centre would still have to run the illegal campus for another three years.
The greatest worry of the students and their sponsors is not the time they have spent pursuing what they thought was university education or even the money they have had to pay but the fact that they might come out empty handed.
With the declaration by the NUC that any degree awarded the students would be illegal and useless, it means that they cannot seek employment or promotion in their work places with their certificates.
There is even a controversy over whether Diamond has ever issued any certificate to any student who graduated from the satellite campus. All the students who spoke to us said that they had also been troubled that they had never come across any graduate of the school who got any degree or certificate.
One student said that when a group of them confronted Mr. Odunze with the fact, he only assured them that they would get their degrees after completing their course of studies.
From all these Odunze appears to have been the only beneficiary of this bogus scheme. With a current student population of nearly 2,000 this session, Diamond Centre this year alone must have raked in some N160 million from unsuspecting students.

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