Universities body tightens up on honorary degree awards

The Tanzania Commission for Universities (TCU) has moved to regulate all honorary degrees conferred on its citizens by local and foreign universities, saying that such honours must be in line with the country’s Universities Act.

The commission says it will only recognise such honours if they are issued by accredited and recognised universities in the countries in which they operate, and in accordance with the law.

The warning comes in response to the growing problem of degrees, mainly issued by foreign universities, being conferred on political and business leaders in Tanzania and the larger East Africa region, reportedly in exchange for money or other favours. It is a problem that goes back at least to 2010 when TCU first raised the alarm, complaining that VIPs were being issued with awards by institutions whose credibility was “highly questionable”.

In a recent public notice, TCU Executive Secretary Charles Kihampa warned that honorary degrees can only be conferred by higher learning institutions that are accredited and registered under the Universities Act.

The notice cautioned that it was an offence to run university academic activities, among them “conferment of academic awards”, without authorisation by the TCU.

“Similarly, honorary degrees conferred by foreign institutions in the foreign countries are recognised by the TCU only when such institutions are accredited and recognised by regulatory authorities in their respective countries,” Kihampa said in a notice issued last month.

The Act bars any Tanzanian person or institution from offering any academic award without approval from the commission. The same is true for foreign universities operating in Tanzania, even if they offer the honour in collaboration with local universities.

Foreign universities issuing the often controversial degrees must do so in compliance with the Universities General Guidelines number 226 of 2013, which spell out procedures and rules for foreign universities wishing to operate in the country, the commission says.

An honorary degree, usually a doctorate, is awarded in recognition of a distinguished person’s contributions to a specific field or to society in general, and is usually the highest honour that any university can bestow on a person, according to the University of Nairobi.

The practice dates back to the Middle Ages when a university would “be persuaded, or otherwise deem it fit, to grant exemption from some or all of the usual statutory requirements for the award of a degree”.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli is among the most recent recipients of the award, having received the honour from the University of Dodoma in November 2019. Kenya’s world marathon record-holder Eliud Kipchoge is a beneficiary of multiple such honours in the recent past.

The TCU recently published an updated version of its Handbook for Standards and Guidelines for University Education in Tanzania to guide, inter alia, the growing open, distance and e-learning segment of higher education. The handbook sets out measures, actions and general conditions to be met by organisations wishing to offer distance learning in the country.

The TCU says that since 1996 when private university institutions started to emerge in Tanzania, there has been an exponential expansion of higher education in the country. The growth has led to a more than 15-fold rise in the higher education gross enrolment rate between 1997 and 2016, necessitating tighter regulation of the sector.