The Imo state House of Assembly, led by Kennedy Ibeh, has resolved to invite the zonal coordinator of the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) to its plenary, to find out why it has decided to impose the sum of N500,000 on each of the 266 public and private122 schools alleged to have been engaged in examination malpractices in the past.
It was further alleged that there was another N150,000 per school to enable the council get external invigilators that would supervise the schools concerned in their forth coming Secondary School Certificate Examinations(SSCE).
This followed the motion on the floor of the House sponsored by the lawmaker representing Njaba state constituency, Uju Onwudiwe and seven others.
In the motion, she noted that WAEC had unilaterally imposed a fine of N500,000 on each alleged school without any evidence of malpractice documented against them.
It is also without approved policy and upgrade of laws establishing the examination body, their conduct and penalties to be apportioned to stakeholders.
She stated further that the council had in addition to compulsory taxing of candidates for supervision fees, further sanctioned the alleged schools to pay additional N150,000 every year per school and another two years for WAEC external invigilators, if they must come to conduct SSC examinations in those affected schools.
Onwudiwe also informed that the council had imposed various forms of sanctions on the purported schools, their teachers and their future candidates, an action that “infringes on human rights of our students, detrimental to the future of the thousands who should take their examinations soon, and an aberration on the procedure of conduct of public affairs and an act of injustice meted out on all Imolites.”
She frowned at a situation whereby WAEC decided to use “bandwagon device” on the schools when in actuality, an individual candidate was involved in the malpractice, adding that such candidate should have been made to face the penalty which could amount to seizure of the candidate’s result, but that such “does not have any extended penalty to the host school, and does not have any implication on the teachers from the school.”
She stated that an alleged malpractice leveled against any particular set of students in the course of their examination should not have interpolative effect over a succeeding set of candidates who had no hand in the alleged misconduct and therefore should not be liable to any form of de-recognition of centre, thereby throwing a whole generation of candidates into untold hardship of sort.
