At least 17 persons have been paraded by the Police at the Force headquarters on September 25, for aiding and abetting examination malpractices during the last West African Examination Council (WAEC) in the country.
Those paraded include School Principals, Teachers and Supervisors. They were allegedly caught engaging in various forms of examination malpractices, ranging from writing, dictation of answers or leaking the question before the commencement of the exam.
Examination malpractices have taken monstrous dimension in Nigeria with the active collaboration of schools and parents. The schools even build the cost of the examination malpractice into the registration fee they charged their students.
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According to the police, the 17 suspects were arrested from Kano, Bauchi, Nasarawa and Rivers states. Others in Delta, Enugu and Lagos states have been prosecuted in the courts.
Police spokesman, Frank Mba, said the arrest was made possible with the cooperation of the West African Examination Council.
“Some of them are Teachers, Principals in Secondary Schools. One of them is a Primary School teacher. Some of them were host of teachers, some are supervisors in the school where the exams took place,” he said.
An official of WAEC, Omolemi Hassan, who represented the Head of National Council of WAEC, thanked the Nigeria Police Force for collaborating with the examination body in dealing with the menace of examination malpractice.
She said contrary to insinuations in the social media that there was leakage of WAEC examination question papers during the exams, there was nothing like that. She said.
“There was no leakage at all. It was those we trusted as invigilators, supervisors that tried to scuttle our efforts by taking pictures of the question papers and posting them to certain people. But before the suspect could escape, the Police arrested them. One of the arrested suspects and Principal of a Private Secondary School, Essence Secondary School, Port Harcourt, Hanson Belot, said he regretted that action even though many of the students were crying that because of COVID-19 lockdown, they were not taught many of the subjects as school,” she said.