CALABAR– The University of Cross River State (UNICROSS) management has revealed that academic records for students who attended the institution before 2017 are currently inaccessible, leaving years of institutional history and thousands of alumni transcripts in administrative limbo NEGROIDHAVEN can report authoritatively.
The disclosure came during a tense press conference at the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Press Centre in Calabar on Tuesday, where senior university officials addressed what they called “challenges” in migrating student data between old and new digital portals.
Dr. Anderson Etika, the university’s Director of Exams and Results, explained that the transition from the old result management system to a new one led to a massive data migration failure. While results from the 2017–2018 academic session through 2022–2023 have now been uploaded to the new system, records from the institution’s founding years up to 2016 remain unavailable in digital form.
“We’ve successfully migrated data from the 2017 session to the 2023 academic session to the new portal,” Etika said. “But you are looking at data points that are over five million… We had to concentrate first on students who needed to graduate.”
When pressed by journalists on when pre-2017 records would be restored, Etika responded: “Once we are all settled down with these issues we have, we will have enough time to bring back the whole result.”
The data gap affects all students who graduated from or attended the institution before 2017—a period spanning more than 15 years of the university’s existence since its establishment as a polytechnic in 2002.
The admission highlights a deeper institutional failure in digital record-keeping at an institution originally founded as the Cross River State Polytechnic. During questioning, journalists pointedly asked why the university—which should specialize in technological solutions—had failed to maintain its own academic data infrastructure.
NEGROIDHAVEN challenged the narrative of technical complexity: “Why was it difficult for the university to migrate data for at least [its] 22 years of existence?… When will the university go back from 2017 backwards?”
In response, Etika shifted responsibility, stating that the directive to switch software systems “predates the vice-chancellor” and that the university, as a government-owned institution, follows official directives.
The crisis has real-world consequences for alumni needing official transcripts for employment or further studies, as well as for former students with incomplete academic records. While current students from 2017 onward can now access real-time results under the new system, those from earlier years face uncertainty.
On her part, Prof. Stella Maris-Okey, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), who represented Vice-Chancellor Prof. Francisca Bassey, appealed for public understanding, emphasizing that the current management team has been in place for only six months. She framed the situation as part of a broader cleanup effort.
“We are here to clear the air… We are on top of the matter,” she stated, acknowledging widespread social media complaints about delayed results and graduations.
However, the press conference revealed that being “on top of the matter” does not yet include a clear timeline or actionable plan for recovering nearly two decades of academic records—leaving the legacies of thousands of UNICROSS graduates trapped in a digital black hole.
