What if the man chairing your university’s governing council, the man in charge of its money, policy and standards, was never actually a professor? At Michael and Cecilia Ibru University, that’s exactly what’s being alleged.

Here’s a messy one.

You’ve probably seen him on TV, Anthony Kila, introduced everywhere as ‘Professor’ and even as a ‘Jean Monnet Professor of Strategy and Development’. He was appointed Pro-Chancellor of Michael and Cecilia Ibru University, MCIU, back in August 2025.

And just to be clear, a Pro-Chancellor is not ceremonial. He chairs the governing council that is in charge of the general control and supervision of the administration, policy, finance and assets of the university.

But a PREMIUM TIMES investigation has now punctured that whole image.

According to their findings, Mr Kila has for years paraded himself as a Professor and a Jean Monnet Professor on television, in newspapers and on official websites, but no recognised university in Nigeria or abroad has ever awarded him that rank.

When asked, Mr Kila told reporters his professorship came from the European Centre for Advanced and Professional Studies, ECAPS. The investigation found the institution is non-existent — it only appears in his own profiles. His profiles on MCIU and CIAPS also contain other suspicious qualifications.

MCIU’s response? Not great. When PREMIUM TIMES called, a man who claimed to be the spokesperson but wouldn’t give his name said: “We don’t debate issues. You can go up with whatever you are going up with.”

This isn’t just about a title. Nigeria has over 270 universities and over 2 million students. Parents borrow, hustle, and pay huge fees because they trust the system. If the man at the very top embellishes his credentials, what does that say about the value of the degree your child is working for?

A Jean Monnet Professor is a real, prestigious chair awarded by the European Union for experts in EU studies; you can’t self-award it. And a full professor in Nigeria must be vetted and promoted through a university senate and the National Universities Commission (NUC.

We’ve been here before. In 2019, the NUC disclosed it had uncovered about 100 fake professors in the country’s universities during a verification exercise to compile a directory of professors. The Commission had to send names to universities for verification after some people tried to sneak into the database. That scandal never really went away.

Three things to watch:

Will the NUC step in and publicly verify Mr Kila’s academic status?

Will MCIU explain how it vetted its Pro-Chancellor before August 2025?

Will this trigger a fresh nationwide audit of governing council chairs?

As one education analyst told us, you can’t supervise academic standards if you faked your own.

Reporting based on a PREMIUM TIMES investigation. Rewritten and packaged by cbinews.tv.

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