One Sanusi Tosin was said to have written to the West
African Examinations Council’s office in Lagos Nigeria requesting for the list
of the best students in the recent ‘O’ level exams. His plan was to sponsor and
reward these outstanding students in order to encourage Nigerian secondary
students to aim for high scores in the ‘O’ level exams. To his utter dismay,
WAEC decided to advise a shocking procedure in order to have the requested
information. The letter above shows the response from the management of WAEC to
Tosin Sanusi over his request.
Instead of WAEC supporting the move to support education,
WAEC has chosen to go the way of enriching its pause. WAEC speedily responded with
a request for a processing fee of
N1, 850,000(One Million Eight Hundred and
Fifty Thousand Naira) from the organizer of this proposed sponsorship cause
disappointing the master minders immediately.
All efforts to have Dr. Dacosta, Officer-In-Charge for WAEC
comment on this are yet to be fruitful. If the state of government bodies have
really gotten to the level of soliciting for money in order to provide
information to the public, then one would have to question the role of the
Nigerian legislators who have been making hundreds of laws with little meaning
or impact to Nigerians.
The Nigerian government signed into law the Freedom of
Information bill some few years ago, but it is surprising to know that even the
so-called government bodies have constantly been seen dishonoring this bill on
several occasions.
Nigerians have been outrightly denied access to information
they seek from the government and currently appear that having access to
information in the government will come with a fee, and often high enough to
discourage the pursuit of the request.
We hope the management of WAEC comes to defend this soon and
possibly state the part of the FOI bill that makes provision for government
bodies to request a fee for the processing of requested information to the
public. This recent move by WAEC is described as counter-productive to raising
the standard of education in Nigeria.
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