You Must Get 50% in WAEC, NECO or be Fired- FCT Minister

The FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello has challenged school prin­cipals in the FCT to ensure that from next academic session, all secondary schools in the Federal Capital Territory attain 50 percent success in the West African Ex­amination Council (WAEC) and National Examination Council (NECO). The Minister who gave this challenge during a meeting with school principals in Abuja, he said that the 30 percent success recorded in 2016 WAEC and NECO in FCT schools is no longer acceptable, and warned that students must achieve at least 50 percent pass rate or their principal will be sacked. Malam Bello who was rep­resented at the meeting by the FCT Permanent Secretary, Dr. Babatope Ajakaiye, stressed that the FCT Administration would no longer accept excuses of poor in­frastructure or inadequate teach­ers; saying that school principals must do everything to ensure that this situation is changed. He said it is unthinkable that the FCT with the largest concen­tration of the elite, which should be setting the pace for other states, is now turning out a measly 30 percent success in very critical ex­aminations as WAEC and NECO. “The mandate I will give you that goes with sanction; for this new session, every principal must be determined that for WAEC and NECO in 2017, any principal that does not achieve 50 percent suc­cess should just quietly leave that school because the princi­pal is going to be removed. If you don’t achieve 50 percent success in WAEC and NECO 2017, you are no longer fit to be a principal in FCT and I mean it. That is the minimum that we want for eve­ry school and you must work to­wards it,” he stressed. The Minister added, “We want the success rate to change. That is very important. We can­not be gathering students and at the end of their final year, all they will have is three credits. I don’t know whether you are proud as a principal that in your school, the success rate is five percent. I want principals that will be determined to say in my school, things must change. Infrastructure or no in­frastructure, resources or no re­sources, I want to put myself as a sacrifice and change things. That is what I want to do before I leave the service. I want to be known to have done something good for Nigeria.” Malam Bello also warned principals to desist from charging illegal fees of any sort when pro­visions have already been made through the FCT Secondary Edu­cation Board to run these schools; emphasizing that principals who persist with this ignoble act would also attract heavy sanctions from the FCT Administration. His words: "My mission is not to come and make you sad; but the situation is bad and you know it and we are ready to tackle it. But you must be up and doing too and that is why I said I must call all the principals and talk to you to do the right things. That is what this Administration is about. We are ready to put the right things in place. We are ready to work for Nigeria. But we want people that will join us to do this. That is why when you come to FCT today, it is not business as usual and we want to send that message down to our institutions.”