PTDF Scholarship Scheme: Some Candidates Come with Fake Certificates but We Are Able to Detect That — Agboola

The Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) is an agency of the Nigerian government that is charged with the responsibility of supporting human capacity development for the petroleum sector in the country. Recently, the Fund did a screening process for its next cohort of scholars, during which its Head of Overseas Scholarship Scheme Division, Mrs. Bolanle Kehinde Agboola, spoke with Yange Ikyaa about the relentless work that is being done by PTDF to boost the country’s petroleum sector capacity and to also protect and preserve the integrity of the scholarship scheme for the next generation of aspiring Nigerian scholars. Excerpts:

Please, can you introduce yourself and your role in PTDF?

Okay, my name is Bolanle Kehinde Agboola and I am the Head of the Overseas Scholarship Scheme Division in PTDF. I oversee the scholarship scheme for PTDF.

What exactly is happening here today at your headquarters?

Yeah, what is happening here today is the interview for the award of scholarships to Nigerians for the 2023 academic session, and we are starting the process of awards for the 2023 overseas scholarships.

We have over 5,000 candidates that were shortlisted to partake in the exercise, which is going on nationwide in the six geopolitical zones of the country. 

What are the criteria for qualification to partake in this process?

The first criterion is that you must be a Nigerian, and for the master’s degree scholarship, you must be a student in any of the oil and gas related fields, like engineering, geology, computing, environmental sciences and management. And you must have a minimum of 2:1 (Second Class Upper Division) in any of these fields for you to qualify under the application window, and at the end of the year, candidates are always called to apply.

PTDF is a government agency that is charged with capacity building for the oil and gas industry in Nigeria, and the essence of the program is for Nigerians to take over the operations of the oil and gas industry, and we need to give them the necessary skills that are required for them to be able to operate in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. So, we send them abroad to acquire the skills that are valuable, and we have the scholarship running in the United Kingdom. We also have what we call strategic partnerships with France, Germany, Malaysia and China. 

How long is this process going to last?

The selection process is going to last for one week and, in other words, the interview is going to last for one week.

You spoke about 5000 candidates shortlisted, and I know you are not taking all; so what number are you really looking at? 

Well, that will depend on the budget that we have for the year. For now, I can’t say specifically the number that we are going to be taking. But usually, in previous years, we took three M.Sc. for UK because, like I said, we have two types of collaborations. We have the United Kingdom collaboration and we have the strategic partnership collaboration. So, we take three M.Sc. candidates for the United Kingdom collaboration, and another 3 for what we call GFCM that’s Germany, France, Malaysia and China.

We also take another three M.Sc. and then, for Ph.D., we take two for the United Kingdom collaboration and two for the GFCM collaboration across the states.

Previously, virtual interviews were conducted in some areas; are you still going to do the same thing this time around, and what is the criterion for consideration?

Okay, we actually started virtual interviews post-Covidbecause of the challenge of people moving from one place to another during the Covid era. And since then, it has come to stay, even in this year. Also, we are still going to have interviews for candidates that will not be able to physically attend the interview, though candidates will be considered based on certain circumstances. For instance, maybe somebody is sick, or somebody is outside the country and is not able to come. 

Is there any age limit on these segments of your selections?

We don’t have any age limits for it because we believe that education or learning has nothing to do with age. You can decide to learn at whatever age, so we want to give the chance to everybody that is interested to be able to participate. We don’t have any age limits. 

Is there some sort of technology deployed to discover fake certificates for some applicants who may decide to become fraudulent during the screening process?

The Overseas Scholarship Scheme has evolved over the years, and based on our observation in previous exercises or in previous years, we have discovered that some candidates came in with fake certificates and fake credentials. We have seen someone that finished from a university with third class in Nigeria here, who then came in with a certificate from a university abroad with a first class, and we were able to detect that.

So, because of this, we took a step further to ensure the integrity of the exercise, and we came up with some equipment, which are mercury lamps. That is also what is used in the banks to detect fake money. And good enough, it was one of our panelists, who was also our scholar that donated that to us this year. We, therefore, believe that this will be able to curb, to a large extent, the issue of fake certificates. 

Is there any special consideration for oil-producing areas in administering these scholarships? 

Yes, there is. We have additional slots for oil-producing states apart from the three and two that I talked about earlier.

Is this the first or last stage of the selection process?

Well, maybe I will start from taking you through the selection process. After we open our application portal for the year and we call on qualified Nigerians to apply, then the computer will generate points for the candidates based on their certifications, considering what they have filled in the application pages and the points will be allocated from the first to the last certificate.

And after we have done that, we at the departments will decide on how many candidates we are going to shortlist to attend the interview, because we have hundreds of thousands of applicants. For this year, we decided it was going to be about 5,000 candidates.

At this stage, staff of the Fund will now physically open the portal and open the documents and certificates that have been attached. And the reason for this is that somebody might come and fill a first class but, at the end of the day, the real certificate will be a third class and the system will not be able to detect that. So, we will now physically open it and be able to match the certificates and the grades with what has been filled on the application. Based on this, we will then shortlist the number of candidates that we require for that year to go for the interview.

This year, we brought a new approach into it because, like I said earlier, we always strive for excellence in this program and to make sure that the program has integrity. So, this year, we got external experts to review the shortlist and after the staff had already checked, we submitted our selection to a group of experts to review our shortlisting in order to be sure that whosoever is shortlisted is truly qualified to attend the interview.

And that was exactly what was done, which is another level of scrutiny and standardization. That is about the third level and this is the final level of the selection process. After this interview, of course, the best candidates will emerge and the award will be given to such candidates.