Melaye, Amaechi’s degrees in question as Baze varsity gets banned from admitting law students

The Council of Legal Education (CLE) has imposed a five-year ban on law admissions at Baze University in Abuja for serially violating its approved intake quotas.

The CLE oversees and supervises the education of individuals aspiring for legal practice in Nigeria.

In a statement last week, the council said findings showed that Baze University was carrying over a worrisome 347 backlogged law graduates awaiting admission to the Nigerian Law School (NLS).

The CLE stated that since 2017, the university has been exceeding its 50 students per session allotment to admit over 750 law students, which would have taken 15 years to fill based on the right quota.

It added that the institution also improperly runs a three-year law degree for some candidates instead of the accredited five-year national benchmark.

CLE said banning the university from admitting students to its law faculty for five years will enable the institution to resolve the backlog and quota compliance crisis.

The disclosure and successive sanction may bring to question the validity of the degree certificates of some prominent politicians who undertook law programmes at the university within the 2017-2023 window.

Among these individuals are Dino Melaye, Rotimi Amaechi, Ifeanyi Ubah, and Osita Chidoka.

Melaye, the governorship candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 Kogi governorship election, is one of the alumni of Baze University.

The former Kogi West senator bagged an LLB, first degree, in Law from the university in 2021.

Ifeanyi Ubah, the senator representing Anambra South and former governorship candidate of the Young Progressive Party (YPP), also studied law at Baze University.

Ubah, in 2021, bagged a degree in Law from the Faculty of Law at Baze University.

Chidoka, a prominent politician from Anambra state and former aviation minister, graduated with an LLB Second Class Upper from Baze University.

Amaechi, who is the former transportation minister, similarly graduated from Baze varsity in 2022.

Apart from the quote violation, the CLE said the minimum benchmark academic standard (BMAS) for law degree programmes in Nigeria is five years for UTME candidates and four for direct-entry students.

“Follow-up visits will be paid to the university to ascertain the extent of the measures it has taken to remedy the anomalies observed,” the council said in part.

As of the time of this report, neither the CLE nor Baze University has communicated how they intend to remedy the situation for alumni who have already been awarded their degree certificates.

The duration of the degree programmes undertaken by the named politicians also remains to be ascertained.