Headline

UK Varsities Seek NUC’s Approval To Run Degree Programmes

Published

2 years ago

October 12, 2023

In a bid to help Nigerian students that are unable to meet up with the financial requirements to study in the United Kingdom, officials from the London Academy Business School, LABS, and University of Sunderland are seeking approval from the National Universities Commission, NUC, to run degree programmes in Nigeria.

A delegation from the University of Sunderland led by Dr. Derek Watson confirmed this after a meeting with the Acting Executive Secretary of NUC, Chris Maiyaki on Wednesday in Abuja.

The university is expected to commence academic activities from January, 2024 if it certifies all the requirements from the NUC, which is the regulatory agency of universities in Nigeria.

The prospective students according to the delegation are expected to pay half of what their colleagues in the UK are paying as tuition fee.

Already the officials from LABS and Sunderland University have visited the management of the Public Service Institute of Nigeria, located at Kubwa road in Abuja, to inspect the facilities at the institute.

Speaking after meeting with the NUC Executive Secretary, Watson, an associate professor from the faculty of business law and tourism assured that students in Nigeria would have the same academic standards with their counterparts in the United Kingdom, while the management at the same time promised to respect the environment and guidelines from the NUC.

Speaking after the meeting with NUC, he said: “The meeting with the Executive Secretary was very productive, the university of Sunderland has over 30 years of experience.

“We were the first UK university to market. What we have agreed on today is the criticality in following the compliance procedures. In addition to that we would source credible academics to deliver our programmes from LABS who are qualified teachers and also practicing consultants. The student will get the same experience as those students studying in England.”

President/Director of Studies, London Academy Business School, (LABS), Dr. Larry Jones-Esan, explained that the visit to NUC was to get the nod to run programmes in Nigeria.

He said: “The meeting with the NUC today is for us to get the recognition that we are allowed to run the Sunderland courses in Nigeria so, we do not need the NUC accreditation, what we need is recognition, that is very important because if we run any courses in Nigeria without them recognizing it, that degree is useless and they cannot do NYSC, so we do not want that to be the case.

“So for us to do that, we have to get their permission first before we go out there and start recruiting students otherwise we will be shooting ourselves in the foot. If they come here and say you are doing something illegal, you will pay fine and before you get out of that it will be too much.

“So what we have done is that we bring those people in and come in myself as the CEO of the London Academy Business School, make sure that we have them aware of what we are doing.

“Today is a very important day for the London Academy Business School in partnership with the University of Sunderland. We met with the Executive Secretary of the National University Commission and discussions went as planned, making sure that we do things right.

“One thing that came out very clear is that they want people work with them but work in a way that they respect the authority and respect the system and the environment.

“So we are going to make sure that everything we do follows the guidelines. We have a very beautiful guidelines but if you fail to follow them you might run into trouble. If two million people apply for university admissions every year in Nigeria and only 700 hundred thousand are getting a place, that is a problem and that is a challenge and they want to solve that problem and we think we have came at the right time.

“We thank the delegates from the University of Sunderland working with the London Academy Business School in making sure that this gives result as quickly as possible.”

Earlier, the team visited the Public Service Institute of Nigeria along Kubwa road Abuja which is going to serve as the study center and they were received by the Administrator and CEO of the institute, Abdul-Ganiyu Obatayinbo.

The Administrator said the environment was far better than what the University of Sunderland has in the UK, adding that the institute was saddled with the responsibility of building the capacity of public/civil servants.

He said that the institute has a 500 seat auditorium, 12 different halls of 30 seater capacity each, hostels with 202 bedrooms, hospital, security quarters, sports complex, entrepreneurship center among other facilities that would make teaching and learning conducive.

Some of the courses to be offered at the undergraduate level included, computer science, business and management, network system engineering among others, while business administration, international business management, education leadership among others will be offered at the masters level.

Headline

UK Police Hunt Asylum Seeker Mistakenly Freed For Sex Offence

Published

7 hours ago

October 25, 2025

Editor

UK police were still hunting Saturday for an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender whose crimes sparked a wave of anti-immigration protests and who was accidentally released from prison.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by Friday’s “totally unacceptable” error that saw 38-year-old Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu freed rather than sent to an immigration detention centre.

“This man must be caught and deported for his crimes,” the UK leader added.

Kebatu had served the first month of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and a woman, but was reportedly due to be deported when the Prison Service mistake occurred.

Kebatu’s high-profile case earlier this year in Epping, northeast of London, sparked demonstrations in various English towns and cities where asylum seekers were believed to be housed, as well as counter-protests.

Justice Secretary David Lammy said late Friday night that Kebatu was “at large in London” after he was seen boarding a train to the capital in Chelmsford, eastern England.

Essex Police, which is leading the search with the help of London’s Metropolitan Police, said Saturday that “inquiries are continuing at pace this morning to locate and arrest” him.

“Officers worked throughout the night to track his movements, including scouring hours of CCTV footage,” the force added, noting “it is not lost on us that this situation is concerning to people”.

The Telegraph reported he was wrongly categorised as a prisoner due to be released on licence and handed a £76 ($101) discharge grant.

The father of Kebatu’s anonymous teenage victim told Sky News that “the justice system has let us down”.

Police arrested the asylum seeker in July after he repeatedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl and touch her legs, and made sexually explicit comments to her.

He also sexually assaulted an adult woman, placing a hand on her thigh, when she intervened to stop his interactions with the girl.

At the time, Kebatu was staying at Epping’s Bell Hotel, where scores of other asylum seekers have been accommodated, and which became the target of repeated protests.

Headline

UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”

Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.

In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.

“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.

Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.

NDLEA intercepts drugs hidden in snails, others meant for UK, US, DRC
Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.

“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”

In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”

Headline

King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

Published

3 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.

The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.

It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.

The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.

The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.

Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.

Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.

It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.

– Schism –

The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.

In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.

The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.

The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.

This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.

Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.

– Royal Confrater –

Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.

The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.

Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.

The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.

The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.

It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.

AFP