ARMSTRONG ALLAHMAGANI, Bauchi
Bauchi State government has said that about 200 final year students whom it paid for their West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) have missed taking the exam.
The Commissioner of Education in the state, Dr Aliyu Tilde, in a statement issued to journalists in Bauchi on Thursday said that the names of the students were fraudulently expunged and substituted with ineligible candidates.
He said some of the victims also committed errors at the point of registration adding that the errors cut across biometric and misspelling.
He said: “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.”
Tilde said that the government was taking time to verify the list independently and arrive at the exact figure, which he said is likely bigger than uncovered figure.
Recall that the Commissioner had on August 16 raised an alarm that list of some ineligible candidates were inserted in the master of WAEC list while leaving bonafide students stranded.
Tilde added that: “There are some 400 others who either did not turn up for the online registration or had technical issues which some few of the vendors who did the registration did not care to cross check because they were heavily underpaid by a contractor.”
He noted that mostly, unscrupulous individuals highjack any government’s subsidised programme by way of diversion and or inflation.
“In my State, since the practice was introduced ten years ago, government sponsors only those that can pass an aptitude test.
“From 2016, the corruption associated with this subsidy has grown in my state. At the beginning of the year, my Ministry fought the obvious disregard for merit and the importation of names of external candidates into the list of government sponsorship.
“We won by successfully blocking external candidates at that level. We conducted an aptitude test for pupils we could find at school and came up with a list of about 15,000 eligible beneficiaries, against the 34,000 in the previous year.”
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