Not less than 200 students have missed the ongoing West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination in Bauchi State.
While disclosing this in a statement on Thursday August 27, 2020, the Bauchi State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Aliyu Tilde, said some of the students’ examination fees were paid by the Bauchi State Government but they were fraudulently expunged and substituted with ineligible candidates by some principals.
He stated that some of the victims also committed biometric and spelling errors at the point of registration.
The Commissioner noted that the 200 candidates were replaced in 30 WASSCE centres in the state “by unscrupulous individuals who always hijack any government’s subsidised programme”.
“We have already confirmed the practice and the names of about 200 (out of the total 13,000) candidates have been sent to the Ministry by schools as the substituted ones in some 30 out of the 170 examination centres,” he said.
Tilde added that the government took time to verify the list independently and arrived at the exact figure, which he said “is likely bigger than the uncovered figure”.
“There are some 400 others who either did not turn up for the online registration or had technical issues which few of the vendors who did the registration did not care to cross-check because they were heavily underpaid by a contractor,” Tilde said.
