By Oluwaseyi Dasho
Nigeria has made participation in its national tertiary-institution ranking exercise compulsory. Universities, polytechnics and colleges of education will no longer be able to opt out. The Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee is being expanded into the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee, or NTERAC, and the 2026/27 university-ranking exercise is expected to begin this month with TETFund support.
The policy is timely. But compulsory participation is not, by itself, the reform. It is only the first administrative step.
The real test is whether Nigeria will use the new system to identify why its institutions remain outside Africa’s leading tier – and then invest in correcting those weaknesses. A ranking that produces only an annual league table may create headlines, but not improvement. A transparent, independently verified exercise linked to institutional support could become a serious instrument of higher-education reform.
Nigeria’s position in the Times Higher Education Africa 2026 table gives the policy urgency. The University of Ibadan and University of Lagos are jointly 12th in Africa, both in the 801–1000 global band. Bayero University, Covenant University and Landmark University are jointly 25th in Africa, in the 1001–1200 global band. Other Nigerian universities appear in the 1201–1500 and 1501+ bands.
These are respectable achievements. Nigeria has substantial representation in a continental table spanning 151 universities in 18 African countries. Yet representation is not the same as leadership. South African universities dominate the continent’s top tier, led by the University of Cape Town at 164th globally, while institutions from Egypt, Morocco, Ghana and Uganda rank ahead of Nigeria’s best performers.
THE’s framework is helpful because it does not reduce university performance to publication counts. It combines 18 indicators under teaching, research environment, research quality, industry and international outlook. Nigeria’s compulsory ranking should adopt the same basic insight: the country does not face one simple “ranking problem”. It faces several connected challenges, including uneven teaching conditions, research infrastructure gaps, limited visibility, weak international collaboration, fragmented digital systems and insufficient industry engagement.
A national ranking should reveal these differences, not bury them inside one opaque score.
Nigeria has been here before. The National Universities Commission began ranking universities in 2001, using information from the 2000 programme-accreditation exercise. The framework expanded in 2004 and 2005 to include indicators linked to emerging international ranking approaches, before the process was paused from 2006 until 2018.
That history carries a lesson: a ranking system cannot depend on the enthusiasm of one minister, executive secretary or committee chair. For the new compulsory exercise to survive changes in leadership, it needs published rules, a predictable timetable, a technical secretariat, defensible data definitions, independent auditing and a clear route for institutions to correct material errors.
The 2021 Nigerian University Rankings offer a stronger precedent. I served among the pioneer League of Directors of Academic Planning that helped design, validate and deliver that exercise under the technical leadership of Distinguished Professor Peter Okebukola. Its most important feature was not the final league table, but how it sought to establish confidence in the data before publication.
The process began with workshops and consensus-building among Directors of Academic Planning. Twelve indicators were agreed before data collection. Institutional returns were reviewed by Directors of Academic Planning from other universities and cross-validated against NUC regulatory records. The final report described this validation stage as the most important part of the exercise because it was intended to identify and prevent “rogue data.”
That safeguard should be restored, not diluted.
Compulsory participation can increase the temptation to game metrics. Once rankings affect prestige, student recruitment, managerial reputation or access to support, institutions will naturally seek to present themselves in the best possible light. Definitions can be stretched; staffing or output figures selectively reported; publications counted in ways that inflate performance; and websites expanded without making scholarship more accessible or influential.
The solution is not to abandon ranking. It is to make verification non-negotiable. NTERAC should incorporate independent peer review of submissions, regulatory cross-checks, sample documentary audits, transparent correction procedures and an institutional right of reply before publication.
The Ministry must also be clear about what a national ranking can and cannot measure. NURAC’s August memorandum on the July 2026 Webometrics ranking found that no Nigerian university was in Africa’s top 20. The University of Ibadan was Nigeria’s highest-ranked institution, at 22nd in Africa, followed by the University of Lagos at 23rd and Covenant University at 24th.
That is a serious warning, but Webometrics principally measures digital visibility, repository openness and web-based scholarly communication. It is not a complete judgment of teaching quality, research significance or institutional contribution.
NTERAC should therefore separate three related but distinct dimensions: research quality and influence, research volume and capacity, and visibility and openness. A university may produce strong work but be poorly visible because its repository is weak, its website unstable or researcher affiliations inconsistent. Another may produce many publications without matching research influence. A polytechnic may generate valuable applied innovation and industry impact that conventional citation measures overlook. A college of education may make a major contribution to teacher development and school improvement but not score highly on university-oriented research indicators.
Treating all institutions as though they have the same mission would produce false comparisons, not fair accountability.
TETFund’s role should therefore be developmental before it is punitive. NURAC identifies weak institutional repositories, outdated or fragmented websites, inconsistent researcher identities, low open-access publishing, inadequate library digitisation and underfunded research-support units as barriers to Nigerian universities’ visibility and performance.
The first ranking cycles should trigger investment in those foundations: institutional repositories, library digitisation, stable web domains, research-information systems, ORCID and ROR-linked identities, metadata management and trained staff. It would be counterproductive to penalise institutions for weak visibility before giving them a realistic chance to build the infrastructure that visibility requires.
Finally, NTERAC should publish its methodology before compulsory data submission begins. Institutions should know the indicators, weights, definitions, reporting periods, evidence requirements, normalisation methods and audit procedures in advance. The public should also be able to see enough of the framework to judge whether the results deserve trust.
Nigeria will not rise in Africa’s university hierarchy simply because every institution is compelled to complete a form. It will rise when the data gathered are credible, independently verified and used to finance genuine institutional improvement.
The measure of this reform will not be the first compulsory ranking published this year. It will be whether, three cycles from now, universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and the public see the system as fair – and whether it has helped Nigerian institutions become measurably stronger.
Dr Seyi Dasho, a research scientist, science policy advocate and university teacher, can be contacted via seyidasho@gmail.com
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