The Nigerian Government, on Thursday, said it was considering asking students to sit for the General Certificate Examination, GCE, should it fail to meet up with the West African Examination Council, WAEC’s timetable for the 2020 Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination.

This was disclosed by the Minister of State for Education, Emeka Nwajiuba during the bi-weekly press briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19.

According to him, this may be an alternative since the WASSCE cannot be rescheduled for any reason.

The Minister disclosed further that negotiations were already on to move local language subjects such as Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa as offered in Nigeria, behind from their usual spots as first written subjects.

According to the Minister, “this would be to allow all participating countries the needed time to write the general subjects at the same time if Nigeria is able to meet up with the WAEC timetable.”

“Nigeria is not moving away from it, the option would have been to go to November to take the GCE external exams. Nigeria is carefully studying that if in the event everything fails, we may go to that.

“In the guideline, there is a checklist of the requirements to be put in place and we have given a cut off date so we can know who needs help,” he said.

He said many States in Nigeria have complained about their inability to meet up with the date and that was why the Federal government requested WAEC give the country and the schools some time to meet up.

The Minister said the government will work out a ‘domestication module’ that will take “our peculiar subjects behind after we have done general (subjects).

“This will buy us the time we need for all of us to be at par with the rest of West Africa and operating at the same time because the unanimity with which WAEC has always worked is still very important to us.”