The House of Representatives has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to reverse the decision of the Federal Ministry of Education to bar Nigerian secondary school students from writing the West African School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), and other Common Entrance Examinations.
This is coming after the announcement made by the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, on Wednesday, July 8, 2020, stating that schools under the control of the federal government would not be opening for the forthcoming WAEC exams and urged state governments to toe the line of the federal government.
The plea was conducted through a motion sponsored by Nnolim Nnaji and other lawmakers. According to them, the examinations should instead be held under the guidelines issued by Nigeria Centre for Diseases Control, NCDC.
In the motion, Nnaji observed that “the annual West African School Certificate Examinations scheduled to hold between April 6 and June 5, 2020, was shifted to between August 3 and September 5, 2020, due to COVID-19 pandemic”.
He said, “The choice of August 3 to September 5 2020 period for the conduct of the examination was not arbitrarily set, rather, WAEC consulted extensively with the government of all the five countries that constitute the council before arriving at the new exam date and duration.”
The lawmaker said he was “disturbed by the contradictory pronouncements of the top officials of the Federal Government within such a short space of time, and that Nigeria’s non-participation in this year’s examinations portends serious psychological, socio economic and health effects on the students as well as already overburdened parents and guardians”.
Even though the Hon. Minister of Education insisted that it was not safe to re-open the various institutions in the face of the increasing wave of Covid-19 pandemic, he did not indicate when it will be safe for Nigerian students who have been staying at home since March 23 to participate in the annual examination.
It’s going to be a notorious decision to ban Nigerian students from participating in WASSCE 2020.
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