On Thursday, 6 August 2026, the National Universities Commission (NUC) issued a public notice reasserting itself as the sole body empowered to accredit undergraduate degree programmes in Nigeria. The notice reignited a long-running quarrel: should the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) accredit engineering programmes while students are still in the classroom, or should it wait at the gate, evaluating graduates only afterward, purely to license them? The answer matters more than the dispute. When the statutes, the realities of engineering pedagogy, and the practice of every serious engineering nation are examined, it is unambiguous. COREN has both the legal right and the professional duty to accredit engineering programmes before graduation, not after. NUC’s authority, drawn from the Education (National Minimum Standards and Establishment of Institutions) Act, is real and unchallenged. It sets minimum academic standards and accredits programmes institution-wide. But COREN was never created to rival NUC. It exists to answer a different, narrower, technical question. Does this specific curriculum produce a person competent and safe to design a bridge, wire a grid, or certify a building? For example, recently, Nigeria has one of the highest incidences of building collapse in Africa. Professional bodies estimate that between 1974 and 2024, over 600 building collapses were recorded with more than 1,500 lives lost. To address this challenge, could we analyze the curriculum, teaching and learning process for Civil Engineering students? That requires a professional, outcomes-based judgment a general regulator is not built to make with the same depth as the profession itself. COREN’s legal right is clear in the statute. The Engineers (Registration, etc.) Act, CAP E11, 2004 — amended by Act No. 3 of 2018 — empowers COREN to determine the standards of knowledge and skill engineers must attain. Section 6(1) states a person is only entitled to full registration if trained on a programme COREN has approved, at an institution COREN has approved, in a qualification COREN has approved. Section 9(6) goes further: institutions must submit syllabus, content, and minimum facilities to COREN for approval before a course can be run. This is an explicitly pre-graduation, curriculum-level mandate, written into the very law establishing the Council. Seen this way, “NUC versus COREN” is the wrong frame. Both were created by Acts of the National Assembly (or its predecessor), and neither cancels the other. NUC accredits programme based on different criteria; COREN accredits the engineering programme as a professional pipeline. A country serious about both, needs both answers. NUC’s public notice suggests that bodies such as COREN should wait until graduation. Why does this fail? A five-year engineering curriculum is not merely a body of facts to be tested at the point of exit; it is a sequence of labs, workshops, design studios and industrial attachment that must be built correctly from year one. If COREN inspects only the finished graduate, it can catch a defect only after an entire cohort has already suffered it. Nigeria has already lived this. In March 2026, the Federal High Court ordered the University of Calabar to pay tens of millions of naira to eight former engineering students, later called the “UNICAL 8”. They spent years in programmes lacking accreditation from both NUC and COREN, discovering the gap only after enrolment. The court held that no institution should admit students without settled, disclosed accreditation status. The same logic is already moving upstream. In June 2026, NUC itself wrote to JAMB directing it to recognise COREN’s authority over engineering admission quotas, tying intake numbers to COREN’s assessment of actual laboratory, workshop and staffing capacity. If COREN’s judgment is sound enough to shape how many students a department may admit, it is sound enough to shape what those students are taught for the next five years — not merely what happens to them once they leave. For unknown reasons, after about a month, NUC requested JAMB to disregard the directives. Nigeria is not being asked to invent something exotic. Layered accreditation between a general higher-education authority and a specialised engineering body is the global norm, not the exception. In the United States, universities carry institutional and general programmes accreditation from regional or national accreditors, while the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) separately accredits individual engineering programmes. A university can hold full institutional accreditation while a specific programme holds, or lacks, ABET status independently. ABET, a founding Washington Accord signatory, is required or strongly favored for licensure in most US states. The two systems divide the job rather than compete for it. In the United Kingdom, the Quality Assurance Agency performs NUC’s institu
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