In this interview with GBENRO ADEOYE,
the Head of National Office, West African Examinations Council, Mr.
Charles Eguridu, talks about the performance of students in recent
examinations in Nigeria and the challenges facing the country’s
education system.
The West African Examinations Council has
a three-fold mandate. The first is to assist in the development of
sound education. Secondly, to ensure that educational standards are
maintained. Thirdly, to provide the people of West Africa the vision and
the potential that lie beyond examination. Looking at these three
mandates, WAEC is like a mirror and a good mirror has one function, it
reflects back correctly the true image. So the performance pattern that
we witness is a reflection of the quality of teaching and learning that
is taking place in the school system. Now asking me what is responsible,
it’s obvious. There are so many factors responsible. One, the teachers
are not competent. You can see from the example of what we saw in Edo
State, where a teacher could not even read. So how can a teacher impact
the knowledge he does not possess? So the quality of teachers in the
system is such that one cannot vouch for their competence and you find
that even some states were trying to do competency tests for teachers,
but this had to be reversed for obvious reasons. The other factor is
infrastructural decay in the school system. There are no well-equipped
libraries or laboratories, and most of the schools don’t have proper
amenities. We have seen situations where children were learning under
trees. So in such a situation, what do you expect? Another factor that
could be responsible is the fact that parents don’t have time to
supervise their children. Take the Lagos environment as an example,
people leave home as early as 5am to report to work at 7am or 8am, get
back home at about 8pm after work. So what time do they have to
supervise their children and ensure that they do their home works or do
some reading at home? Another factor is that the children are
distracted. The children are left without being properly counselled.
They come back from school and all they are interested in is to either
browse the internet or watch European football leagues, African Magic
and of course, move around with their peers and play football. So, the
motivation to read is not even there. When last did we as a people
recognise excellence in academia? But footballers are celebrated, they
make millions when we win competitions but the best students are not
even recognised. The most beautiful girl in Africa or Nigeria pageants
attract wonderful gifts, money, cars, world tour, and is featured in the
media for her beauty. But the one who spent time in the classroom to
read and excel in his examination, what do we do for him? He is not
celebrated. So the children themselves are not even motivated to read.
Why read when playing football for a club side for just six months will
give you the money you need in a lifetime? The values of our society are
so distorted. So if you combine these factors, you will find that the
Nigerian child is a victim of his environment because children live what
they see. People are blaming WAEC but WAEC is not supposed to doctor
marks to please the society.
Some people say you are making the questions harder.
They can’t be harder. I told you we have a
threefold mandate. To ensure that education standards are maintained is
part of our mandate. If we go back and reduce the standard, will
Nigeria be living in isolation of other countries? Graduates from the
Nigerian school system are supposed to be able to compete with their
colleagues and for your information; West African Senior School
Certificate Examination is an international examination. The standards
are the same for Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and The Gambia,
so we cannot afford to change the standard for Nigeria.
You highlighted the issues of
infrastructural decay and poor facilities in Nigeria, do other African
countries have such challenges?
They do but they are addressing them in
their own little way. I’m aware that in Ghana, when they reversed the
secondary school duration from three to four years, it necessitated
building extra classrooms and recruiting more teachers. The Parent
Teachers Association was encouraged to assist the school system. I was
in Ghana then, my children were in school and I was called upon to
contribute money for the building of extra classrooms which we did. But
in Nigeria, you find that parents have abdicated their responsibilities.
They want government to sponsor everything, pay for their children’s
tuition, their examination fee, and provide uniforms, textbooks, and
lunch. Was the government there when you were producing these children?
Parents should take responsibilities for the upbringing of their
children. Let’s stop placing everything on the shoulders of the
government. Who is the government? It’s you and I, so let’s take
responsibilities as parents.
You said your children schooled in Ghana, didn’t you have faith in your country’s educational system?
No, they schooled in Ghana when I was
working there and now that I’m back in Nigeria, my children came back
with me. Ghanaian education is not superior. We are using the same
curriculum. In fact, our curriculum today is richer than that of Ghana.
We have more subjects than Ghana has now. At times, I wonder when I see
parents sending their children to universities in Ghana. I had every
opportunity to send my children to universities in Ghana but I elected
to allow my children to school in Nigeria because I’m in a business of
education and I know the standards in the universities in Ghana and in
Nigeria and I elected to bring them here. They all schooled in Nigeria,
at least, at the university level. That is indicative of the fact that I
have faith in my country and its educational system.
You made reference to a very
important point; reality TV shows attract up to millions of naira while
for school debates, winners will hardly even get 100,000, so who do you
blame for this?
It shows where our value lies. It’s the
society. Our values have been distorted. We have so many churches,
mosques and shrines. Most of our people are religious but godless. The
fear of God is not there in our hearts and the values we embrace do not
reflect godly character. If we claim to love God the way we do by
building churches, mosques and shrines everywhere, then one would have
expected that to transform our character in the sense that we will be
able to say people are honest and the values they cherish are those
things that God himself will endorse.
Examination malpractice is
still an issue in Nigeria. Special centres that help candidates to pass
exams still exist why is WAEC impotent in addressing this problem?
I will address the issue but let’s talk
about malpractice in the global sense. When you talk about malpractice
we shouldn’t isolate examination malpractice as if it’s the only form of
malpractice that is prevalent in our society. Malpractice is as old as
mankind. Right from the Bible, we have had malpractice. When Rebecca
decided to deceive the husband by putting hair on one of the children,
it is malpractice. Looking at our society, you will find that we have
all forms of malpractice. When a market woman decides to sell half
measure of garri for full measure by using the wrong container,
it is malpractice. So the malpractice we see in examination is a
reflection of the general malpractice we have in the society. In fact,
WAEC should be congratulated for being able to conduct exams without the
presence of military men. Because if Nigeria cannot conduct credible
elections without the presence of security men, then why not
congratulate WAEC for conducting exams across the length and breadth of
Nigeria without the presence of security men? It’s the same population
that we are dealing with. The population that INEC is dealing with is
the population that WAEC is dealing with. WAEC in itself has gone beyond
using coercive measures to prevent malpractice. We are the first
examining board anywhere on the continent of Africa to introduce some
measures and I will tell you a few of them. One of them is that with
effect from the May/June 2014 WASSCE, we have a biometric enabled
certificate. That means that candidates’ biometric features are
imprinted and encryted in quick response code on their certificates.
Even with the photocopy of the certificate, they can trace the true
owner by putting his finger on a scanner and reading it on the
certificate, it will tell the true owner. We are the first and the only
examining body I know of, at least in Africa, that has introduced that
technology. It came out of complete innovation by the officers of WAEC.
Secondly, we have introduced an ICT-driven technology that is able to
capture the processes of the conduct of the examination in any centre
within the country. And at a click of a button, it is transmitted to our
database.
But despite these technologies, WAEC officials and exam supervisors still collude with students to cheat.
Yes, I’m not going to hold brief for the
bad eggs we have. If Jesus Christ had 12 disciples and of the 12 he had
one Judas, you can expect that if WAEC has 10,000 examiners and we have
500 bad ones, at least we can’t do better than Jesus Christ. What we are
dealing with is organised examination malpractice that has the total
cooperation of some supervisors, possibly some school proprietors,
possibly some ministry officials, and possibly some parents. When you
have a parent colluding with the supervisor and the school authorities
to have an organised examination malpractice, it tells you that you’re
dealing with a big issue and that is why government has decided to enact
a WAEC law that places stiffer penalties on those that are caught for
examination malpractice. But I want to let Nigerians know that we are
practitioners in the business of assessment. We have inbuilt procedures
for dealing with examination malpractice. Yes, there may be 1,000 cases
but out of every thousand, I can assure you that WAEC is able to get at
least 95 per cent and deal with them. People that are caught for
engaging in examination malpractice are dealt with. We have sanctions in
place, their results are withheld and the committee of WAEC looks at
them. And where necessary, we cancel results.
How many people has WAEC convicted in the past.
We don’t convict, all we do is report to
the police. I have a live example. We got to know of a special centre in
Ogun State last year. It was real organised examination malpractice. I
went to the police and my management team visited the centre. The
undergraduates were writing the exam for special candidates and of
course, the results were cancelled.
With the pictures and the biometric system, how come they are unable to check such activities?
People are ingenious when it comes to
cheating. The school we saw was registered by the Ogun State government
and everything looked alright but on the day of the examination, he (the
owner) had people from all places who paid special amounts. So the Ogun
State government closed the school down. This should sound as a note of
warning, WAEC is an international organisation, and we will close down
any school whether state or government owned without recourse to the
owners of that institution once candidates are found cheating.
What have you been able to do about WAEC staff often being accused of conniving with candidates to cheat?
When you are delivering service, you must
expect that not everybody will applaud you. That is not to say that
there may be no cases of one or two WAEC staff being involved in
cheating. But wherever we have detected them, we don’t hesitate to
dismiss them from our services. WAEC is the only organisation in Nigeria
I know that has survived from the colonial times till today. West
African Railways collapsed. What is making WAEC survive where others
have failed is because we operate a committee system where nobody is the
emperor? Everybody is accountable.
Technology aids candidates to
text or mail questions to other students. Instead of pushing some of
the blames to schools and teachers, what is WAEC doing about it?
We’ve recognised that long ago and that
is why we have prohibited the use of mobile phones in examination halls.
Candidates are not allowed to take their mobile phones into examination
halls. And in fact for every examination onward, what we are doing is
to have body scanners to get students going into examination halls with
phones. In fact, when a student is caught with a mobile phone, his or
her result is cancelled. That’s how seriously we take that offence.
But often times, we still hear cases of leakages of examination questions.
No, not with WAEC. Not in the past five
or eight years. We have not had any issue of leakage. In fact, we should
congratulate WAEC in Nigeria. We print our questions locally and there
has been no incident of leakage for a long time because we have
competent hands.
Why is it that candidates still get results for subjects they didn’t register for?
No, that’s not with WAEC. I’m not aware
of any student getting results in subjects he or she did not register
for. Please if you have that case bring it to my attention, I will
investigate because we are so well automated. What probably happened in
such a situation is that the student entered for a subject he ought not
to have entered for and then it’s uploaded as part of his entries. And
when the results came out, if he didn’t write the paper, it’s marked X
which means that he or she was absent. The child will now say he didn’t
register but got result for it. In fact, after registration, we normally
open the portals for candidates to verify, cross-check and validate
their entries.
We have heard of cases where
Igbo or Hausa students who can’t speak Yoruba language will score an A
in the subject or vice versa, how does that happen?
Well, anything could happen. Malpractice
takes different forms. It could be that the candidate cheated. It is a
possibility because the examiners mark what they see. So in situations
like that, which is rare, certainly examination malpractice could have
occurred. But it is also possible that some people can write better than
they speak, that they might be able to express what they know orally
because they are not good at speaking but they write better. So that’s a
possibility but it’s very slim. Either way, it’s a rare occurrence.
Why does it take so long for WAEC to sort out delayed results of candidates?
I don’t think it takes so long. This is a
system where candidates have been suspected of cheating and it is only
fair for the due process to take place and WAEC cannot make itself the
accuser and the judge. So we work using a committee system. When we have
a reported case of examination malpractice, we note the case, we
examine it and when we have reasons to believe that we have enough
evidence, we gather the cases and we refer them to the Nigerian
Examination Committee. This committee is not made up of WAEC staff, it
is made up of the representatives of the federal and state ministries of
education, other stakeholders who come in are not sitting as WAEC
staff, and they sit independent of WAEC staff. They look at each case,
one after the other and take a decision on it. So we have not
constituted ourselves as a court to try people we suspect, we get the
reports, we compile them, and hand over to an independent body made up
of representatives of the government. The Chairman of that committee is a
Director in the Federal Ministry of Education, we have the president of
All Nigeria Conference of Principals of Secondary Schools as a member,
we have the representatives of the various ministries of education as
members. So if we do that in a period of less than six months, I think
we should be congratulated.
But only about 31 per cent of the candidates scored credit in Maths and English, do you consider that remarkable?
Why should we isolate Maths and English?
Yes, English Language is the medium of communication in Nigeria but is
it our mother tongue? In fact, for your information, Nigerians did
better than Ghanaians in Mathematics. We had over 64 per cent in
Mathematics, so I’m not of the view that except you have credits in
Maths and English, then you’re not there. If you look at the statistics,
it shows that 46.75 per cent of the candidates scored six credits and
above. So we only isolate Maths and English because people are putting
too much pressure on the two subjects. The policy does not envisage
everybody going to the university.
Public school students in Oyo
State are yet to receive their WASSCE results, there is information
that the state is owing. Is this the case?
It will be unfair for me to come here and
tell you that government of Oyo State is owing WAEC. We are dealing
with the situation, that’s what I can tell you and they will receive
their results very soon.
The House of Representatives
Committee on Education is planning to investigate the recent mass
failure in WAEC examinations, and they are planning to visit you. What
do you think about the move?
Yes, we are waiting for them to come, we will educate them.
We also heard that when they come on such visits, they also like to go back with monetary gains.
I don’t think that would be fair to these
honourable members. That is the problem we have in Nigeria, we like
running down our leaders. It’s not fair to these honourable members. I
know many of them, they are my good friends. I want to say that since I
assumed duty as the head of national office, no legislator or government
official has paid a courtesy call to WAEC to demand anything from me,
rather, they want to find out the problems we are facing. And please
discountenance such rumours because they are unfounded and are the work
of mischievous people.
It’s good to be political but
people who say this are people who gave the money out. You can say that
you have not given, so it’s not a question of running anybody down…
Well, I have not given. I understand but I
want to place it on record that since I assumed duty as Head of
National Office, WAEC Nigeria, there has been no committee from the
House of Representatives or the Senate that has visited the office under
my watch. The time they said they were coming, they didn’t come and
they have not come. Well they have visited others and if they gave them,
I wouldn’t know.
You have spoken about being
automated, but where results have to be sent abroad for students who
plan to study abroad, they still need to get to WAEC office in Yaba,
Lagos even if they live in Maiduguri.
I must admit that you are very correct.
That is something I discovered just a few days ago. And it’s an issue I
will address in the next one month. The reason is not because we cannot
do what people want us to do, but this is a society where you have a
number of people prone to fraud, and a few of them are very ingenious. I
have seen WAEC certificates produced that are not ours. And if you are
not versed with the work of WAEC, you will be unable to differentiate
between the original certificate and the fake one. It’s been so bad that
we had to go back to our printers to enhance the features which I won’t
disclose. That was what prompted the biometric certificate we now
produce. Fraudsters use these certificates to gain admissions abroad. In
the past, we found out that some of our satellite offices had officers
who would compromise and verify those certificates as genuine to
institutions abroad. So in order to harmonise it, we removed the power
from offices in remote areas and decided that when it comes to embassies
and foreign institutions, it has to only come from Lagos where we have
designated people to sign the documents. Otherwise we have online
portals known to embassies and foreign institutions, where they can
confirm but if they still elect to want us to write a letter, the only
person who can certify that will come from Lagos.
Many think the punishment for exam cheats in Nigeria is not appropriate
You are right in your observation, and we
have been concerned about this. That is why we took steps to revise the
WAEC Convention and it has been approved by the government. It went to
the Presidency, the Federal Executive Council has approved and it’s now
going through the second reading at the National Assembly. We have
introduced stiffer penalties for exam cheats. I think five years jail
term and some huge amounts they will have to pay, this has been done in
Ghana. Now whose responsibility is it to apply the law? It is the job of
the law enforcement agencies and the courts. Government makes the law
and offenders are supposed to be sanctioned by the courts, it is not the
job of WAEC to say someone has cheated in an exam and then throw him in
jail. We don’t have such powers, all we can do is to apprehend the
cheats and hand them over to law enforcement agencies and expect that
they take action from there on. We have our legal personnel tracking our
cases in courts but I don’t want to accuse anybody, our role as an
examining board stops at that. We can only report to the enforcement
agencies.
When WAEC registration is on,
most school principals smile to the bank because they use the
opportunity to extort candidates. Why is WAEC not doing anything about
this?
We operate a democracy. My right stops
where yours begins. These schools belong to the state and education is
on the concurrent list and not on the exclusive list. So the states have
a right to run their schools the way they want and WAEC depends on what
the state ministries of education send to us. We also insist that any
school that wants to register for our exam must have the clearance of
the state ministry of education. When the ministry tells us that School A
has been cleared and it has 100 candidates, we have no reason to doubt
the state. When their principals are now charging in excess, I expect
that it should be the state that should caution them. But we deal
directly with candidates for the private exams.
Do you consider the National
Examination Council in Nigeria a threat to you or fear that WAEC may
gradually be phased out of Nigeria?
No, I want to congratulate the government
for setting up NECO. It’s those who don’t have information that
misinterpret government’s intention. It is better for WAEC that we have
more examining boards because competition has a way of creating improved
performance. Nigeria is a big country and we have only WAEC and NECO to
conduct the senior examination in secondary schools. I wish to see a
situation where more examining boards are created. The advantage we have
is that we have been on the ground for well over six decades and our
activities span across Anglophone West Africa. We have harmonised our
certificate so it’s easier for somebody with a WAEC certificate to go to
Ghana and gain admission.
0 Response to "Many Nigerian teachers are incompetent–WAEC Head of National Office, Eguridu"
Post a Comment