Thirty-six Congolese medical diplomas examined, seven attestations confirmed fake, two graduates blocked for ten years: Angola's dispute between the Ordem dos Médicos and INAREES

Angola trains far fewer doctors than it needs. In 2018 Novo Jornal put the figure at about 6,400 doctors for roughly 28 million people, so many Angolans study medicine abroad, and the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the destinations. A graduate coming home must pass two separate gates. INAREES, the national institute for the evaluation and recognition of higher-education studies, recognises foreign degrees under Decree 172/13 of 29 October, and the Ordem dos Médicos de Angola, the medical regulator, issues the professional card without which nobody may practise. In 2018 those two gates gave opposite answers about the same documents.

According to Novo Jornal on 23 February 2018, two Angolans who had studied medicine in the DRC had been unable to practise for more than ten years because the Ordem dos Médicos would not accept their documents or issue professional cards. They held DRC medical diplomas, an internship report from Hospital Josina Machel in Luanda and an equivalence declaration from Universidade Agostinho Neto. A former president of the Order's northern regional council, himself trained at the University of Kinshasa, told the newspaper the papers were false. The director and deputy director of INAREES reviewed the same documents, recognised them as genuine, and noted that the Order had never asked the institute to verify them. The two men filed a new verification request.

Nine months later the wider picture emerged. According to an Angop communiqué carried by MediaCongo on 1 November 2018, the Ordem dos Médicos had complained in May, during a visit by deputies from a National Assembly commission, that INAREES had recognised and homologated some 40 presumed false doctors. Of those 40 files, 36 concerned studies done in the DRC: 25 were attestations issued by INAREES itself and 11 by Universidade Agostinho Neto. INAREES confirmed seven of the 36 as fake, six definitive attestations and one provisional. Attestations for studies in the Russian Federation and one from Rwanda were not in doubt.

The two reports describe one failure from two sides. The regulator judged foreign qualifications by inspection and did not refer them to the body legally responsible for recognition, so graduates the institute considered genuine waited a decade. At the same time, the communiqué describes the seven forgeries as attestations, which are Angolan recognition documents rather than Congolese diplomas, suggesting that someone was producing or altering the very paperwork meant to settle the question. With no routine exchange between the two institutions, applicants were refused on one side while suspect papers passed on the other, until deputies asked questions.

For a student or family weighing a medical degree in a neighbouring country, the lesson is to map the full route home before paying any fee. Find out which body recognises the degree and which licenses the doctor, what each requires, and whether they check with each other. Ask the recognition institute to confirm its decision directly to the regulator rather than carrying a paper between offices yourself. Keep every original, including internship reports, and obtain certified copies. Be wary of anyone offering to arrange an equivalence attestation for a payment, because in Angola's audit it was attestations that were found false. Nigeria's refusal to recognise fake foreign degrees from several African countries, recorded elsewhere on this site, shows how quickly a whole cohort can be caught by such problems.