No fewer than 200 students have been excluded from the ongoing West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination in Bauchi State.
State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Aliyu Tilde, disclosed this in a statement on Thursday.
Tilde said some of the students’ examination fees were paid by the Bauchi State Government but their names were fraudulently expunged and substituted with those of ineligible candidates by some principals.
He added that some of the victims also committed errors at the point of registration, explaining that some of the errors were biometric and misspelling.
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.”
Tilde said the government took time to verify the list independently and arrived at the exact figure, which he said “is likely bigger than the uncovered fi