Pioneer UNICAL Engineering Graduates Protest Year-Long Delay in Certificates and NYSC Mobilisation

Graduates of the 2024 pioneer set of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Calabar, have lamented their inability to obtain their certificates more than a year after completing their studies, alleging that the delay has also stalled their mobilisation for the National Youth Service Corps.

The affected graduates, who signed out in September 2024 and were convoked in March 2025, said they have yet to receive either their certificates or statements of results, a development they described as frustrating and career-threatening.

Recall that in 2023, the UNICAL Faculty of Engineering was embroiled in a crisis of non-accreditation, but the then Vice Chancellor, Prof Florence Obi, countered the claim by the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria.

The UNICAL VC had then said that its engineering courses are just in their third year, getting ready for the National Universities Commission’s accreditation by November 2023.

At the graduation ceremony for the pioneering engineering students in March 2025, the VC had declared that the faculty of engineering had received accreditation from the National Universities Commission in 2024 and the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria in 2025.

In Save Our Soul messages to The PUNCH, the students said they had been repeatedly assured by university management that the necessary documents had been forwarded to the Student Affairs Division to facilitate mobilisation and certificate collection.

According to them, the process of collecting certificates is traditionally tied to NYSC mobilisation.

Certificate and mobilisation go hand in hand. You receive your certificate a few weeks before attending the NYSC camp. So you need to be mobilised to get your certificate,” one of the graduates said.

“We are the 2023/2024 graduate set. We finished in September 2024 and had our convocation in March 2025. Since then, we have not received our certificates.

“In May 2025, we were asked to fill out mobilisation forms and were told we had been internally mobilised. But by November 2025, our names were not uploaded to the NYSC Senate list. We later heard the issue had been rectified and that we would join the next batch. That was the same thing we were told earlier