In yet another controversial policy announced within three months, the West African Examinations Council and the National Examinations Council have introduced a one-off N4,000 result verification fee for students seeking admission into tertiary institutions with their O’Level results. The government must cancel it.
The Head of Public Affairs, WAEC, Moyosola Adesina, in a joint statement on behalf of the two examination bodies, said the initiative was intended to prioritise students’ interests.
“This arrangement is designed to ensure that candidates who have successfully verified their WASSCE O’Level result through the Verification Service platform will not be required to repeat the same verification exercise,” the statement said.
This is an objectionable collaboration. It amounts to a fresh assault on the right of Nigerian children to education.
A total of 1,959,668 candidates sat the May/June 2026 WASSCE. They already paid examination fees to obtain their results.
Now, at N4,000 per student, WAEC and NECO could rake in about N7.84 billion from this verification exercise alone.
That is no small change. It is a significant amount to extract from families already struggling to keep their children in school.
And the timing could hardly be worse.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has exposed the hypocrisy of the argument that examination bodies must continually squeeze students to remain financially viable.
By dint of prudent resource management and transparent operations, the immediate past Registrar of JAMB, Ishaq Oloyede, reduced the cost of the UTME by 30 per cent, from N5,000 to N3,500, while the board continued to declare substantial operating surpluses year after year.
In his first year in office in 2017, JAMB remitted N7.86 billion to the Federal Government. This was a dramatic departure from the paltry N50 million remitted by the board between 2015 and 2016 before he took office.
By 2022, JAMB had remitted N50 billion to the Federal Government.
WAEC and NECO should learn from that model.
Instead, after the suspension of the ill-conceived decision by the Federal Ministry of Education, WAEC and NECO to increase school certificate examination registration fees from N27,000 to N50,000, the two examination bodies appear determined to smuggle another exploitative policy through the back door.
This must not be allowed.
Education is a right, not a luxury. Examination bodies should facilitate access to education and protect the integrity of academic records; they should not become revenue-generating agencies whose survival depends on extracting more money from struggling families.
President Bola Tinubu must therefore stop this rip-off.
Indeed, the Federal Government should use this controversy to pursue a broader policy shift.
All three tiers of government should work towards fully paying WAEC and NECO school certificate examination fees for Nigerian children, as is done in Ghana and Sierra Leone. The Gambia sponsors part-payment.
If these countries can provide such support, there is little justification for Nigeria, with vastly greater resources, to abandon its children to the mercy of fees and levies.
State governments, in particular, must deploy a greater proportion of their allocations to education. Education is the foundation upon which every serious nation is built.
The governments must also restore scholarships and bursaries for undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The Nigeria Governors’ Forum should rally the 19 indebted states to clear their N2 billion debt to NECO. Governments cannot plead poverty when they owe the very institutions charged with educating and certifying their citizens.
Certainly, reducing administrative stress, simplifying the admission process and enhancing the security and integrity of academic records are legitimate objectives, as WAEC and NECO have argued.
But why should the students pay for it?
Why should the cost of technology adopted by an examination body be passed directly to young Nigerians seeking admission to university, polytechnic or college of education?
What, indeed, is the actual per-head cost of the technology being used for this so-called verification?
These questions deserve clear answers.
It is particularly indefensible in a country where some government workers earn as little as N70,000 a month.
Millions of Nigerian households are already groaning under punishing food, transport, healthcare and rent costs. Every additional levy pushes another child closer to the edge of exclusion.
And there is something fundamentally absurd about asking students to pay to verify results issued by the same examination bodies demanding the payment.
WAEC and NECO cannot be allowed to turn academic certification into another toll gate.
Nor should they be allowed to conspire with private IT firms, deliberately or otherwise, to impose additional costs on hapless young citizens without convincing evidence that such costs are unavoidable and reasonable.
Already, Parent-Teacher Associations and old students’ associations bear school fees and examination costs for many poor students simply to keep them in school. Some even pay teachers.
This is the reality on the ground.
Nigeria has millions of children out of school and ranks among the countries with the largest out-of-school populations in the world. Poverty, insecurity and chronic underinvestment in education continue to swell the numbers.
The answer cannot therefore be to make education more expensive.
Several countries, including Germany and the Scandinavian nations, provide free education for their citizens from primary through university level. Nigeria may not immediately replicate their systems, but it should at least stop making access to education progressively harder for poor families.
Every unnecessary fee is another barrier that risks another child dropping out.
Tinubu should not allow the proposed N4,000 WAEC/NECO verification fee to see the light of day.
More importantly, it must begin treating education as a national investment rather than a convenient source of revenue.
Nigeria cannot build a knowledge-driven, technology-powered 21st-century economy by repeatedly reaching into the pockets of the very young people expected to build it.
The Punch
