When our correspondent visited the NECO
headquarters, the tensed workers were seen discussing the fate that
would befall them if the policy was implemented.
The Federal Government, it was reported
on Wednesday, had decided to implement the recomemndations of the
Oronsaye-Panel that listed NECO among 38 federal agencies that would be
scrapped or merged with others. Though the Federal Government had not
confirmed or denied the planned action, there was palpable tension in
NECO on Thursday.
At the Information Unit of the council
in Minna, officials refused to comment when approached on the issue.
They only directed our correspondent to the Registrar, Prof. Promise
Okpala. But he was said to be away when our correspondent got to his
office.
However, a senior official, who pleaded
anonymity because he was not permitted to speak to the press, said
there was no wisdom behind the attempt to scrap NECO.
“Let’s look at it this way: Britain is
not up to half the size of Nigeria and it has about eight examination
bodies. How then can Nigeria have only examination body?
“Secondly, why lump us with the West
African Examination Council? WAEC does not belong to Nigeria, so what
does the country stand to gain by handing over structures of NECO to
WAEC?
“Thirdly, how possible is it for WAEC,
or any examination body for that matter, to organise one SSCE in
November and organise another one two months later, when they have not
released the result of the one conducted in November?.
“Again, we should not be in a hurry to
forget when Nigerian candidates suffered untold hardship in the hands of
WAEC, which led to the birth of NECO.
“As at that time, open any newspaper
and what you see are appeals by candidates asking WAEC to release their
results. The coming of NECO stopped all that. Now, we are going back to
the era of colonialism, may, be we should even hand over the Presidency
of this country back to Britain,” he said.
Also, the Niger State Commissioner for
Education, Alhaji Abdulhameed Danladi, in an interview with our
correspondent in Minna, said though he believes government’s policies
are dynamic and can be changed at any time, the decision to scrap the
examination body must be given a second look in the overall interest of
Nigerian educational development. He stressed that the nightmare
Nigerians went through in the hand of WAEC should not be allowed to come
back.
He pointed out that government has the
right to make policies, but such should have positive bearing on the
lives of the people because governance is all about people.
“My concern about scrapping of NECO is about the over 5,000 Nigerians working there that will lose their job.
“Here we are in a country where
unemployment is on the high side and because of that, the government is
coming up with a lot of programmes aimed at creating employment and
mopping up unemployed youths from the streets and now you want to scrap
NECO and increase the rate of unemployment in the country.”
He, however, argued that “what I don’t
think is right is for government, in an attempt to solve one problem,
start to create another. Examination is the only way to evaluate the
performance of students and if you now scrap NECO, how do you evaluate
candidates? If it is NECO that the Federal Government does not want, let
them set up another one, but there must be an examination body that is
wholly Nigerian.”
Danladi advised that rather than scrap NECO, the government should reposition it and add value to it for better performance.
PUNCH
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