Why OAU's 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 Session Certificates Distribution Is Delayed

Why OAU's 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 Session Certificates Distribution Is Delayed

While some people would write their last exam, submit their project, and just leave the school without doing their clearance or anything for years, some still manage to do their clearance and collect their Statement of Result (To Whom), but they wouldn’t try to collect their certificate until several years later that an institution is insists it’s the certificate they need not the Statement of Results; then they show up wanting to get their certificate. There are however some who want their certificate as soon as possible, but then, most schools in Nigeria are not able to provide certificates as soon as you graduate; most need one to two years for certificates to be ready.  Example of these schools is OAU; graduates have always had to wait for like two years to be able to collect their certificate. But for most of the people who graduated in 2024, they may have to wait longer than two years.

 

Back story: I wrote about the school wanting to change their certificates from the just-ink-on-yellow-paper type to the type that would have some security measures, and hi-tech codes on it to enable scanning for verification and so on (read it here). Yes, the school is very committed to this; they wanted to start it with the 2025 graduates, then they added the 2024 set to the project (because not many people had been able to collect their 2024 certificates). I even heard they started asking 2024 people who have collected theirs to return it so they can collect the hi-tech one when it’s ready.

 

The new certificates were planned to be ready earlier this year, but some technical issues happened (as we heard). Allegedly, the project was awarded based on paddy-paddy (a thing about our system; things are not based on merit and who can deliver excellence), so after working on some of the certificates, as we heard o, there were some mix-up in the programming of the codes on the certificates. So they had to scrap the production… allegedly o. What we don’t know now is whether the project has been scrapped finally to go back to printing the old certificates or they went back to the boards to continue on producing the hi-tech certificates with better plans.

 

The implication of this is that, while the 2024 graduands were supposed to have their certificates ready this year (if it was the old one being printed), and the 2025 graduands should be expecting theirs too anytime in 2027, the two set may have to wait till much later in 2027 before they can have their certificates—whether it’s the hi-tech production the school is continuing with or they have backed down on the project to continue issuing the old type of certificate. I wish them well those who would be needing their certificate urgently for what their Statement of Result cannot do.