Bauchi State Commissioner of Education, Dr. Aliyu Tilde has said that names of over 200 students have been fraudulently expunged and substituted with ineligible candidates writing this year’s West African Examination Council (WAEC).
Tilde in a statement issued to journalists, yesterday, said some of the victims also committed errors at the point of registration. According to him, 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.”
He said government was taking time to verify the list independently and arrive at the exact figure, which he said is likely bigger than uncovered figure.
The Commissioner had on August 16, day before the commencement of this year’s examination raised an alarm that list of some ineligible candidates were inserted in the master of WAEC while leaving bonafide students stranded.
He added that: “There are some 400 others who either did not turn up for the online registration or had technical issues which some of the vendors who did the registration did not care to crosscheck because they were heavily underpaid by the contractor.”
He noted that mostly, unscrupulous individuals highjack any government’s subsidised programme by way of diversion and or inflation.
“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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My daughter is among the victim and I will not forgive and forget.