The West Africa Examination Council has announced plans to make its certificates available to candidates of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination once their results are released.

The Head of National Office, Patrick Areghan, made this known on Tuesday at a luncheon organised by the exam body in Lagos.

He also noted that the digital certificate set to be launched on Thursday, October 20, 2022, applies to those who wrote the exams between 1999 till date, adding that the preceding years would be considered much later.

According to him, the new the digital certificate cannot be tampered with or falsified, just as it would send fakers out of the market.

He said, “Whether your certificate was burnt or lost to flood or eaten by termite, you don’t have to go through the stress of recovering it. Just pick your phone and log on to our website and it comes straight from the WAEC database.

“We have solved the problem of theft. We have saved you the headache of carrying the hard copies of your certificate. And the good thing that will come out of this is, by the time we take a final decision and perfect everything, if we release the results today, I can tell you that the certificates are ready. It is just to roll them out. If we announce the release of results today, the certificates will automatically be ready for release. It may just take a year to transit, because the certificates we have now is going to be treated, but immediately they are treated, they will be available in the database. The next one, that will be 2023 or 2024, immediately we release the results the certificate will be ready.”

He, however, listed insecurity as one of the challenges the body was facing in conducting exams across the country.

He said, “Places where you go to by road, you now have to fly because of insecurity. Almost everybody in WAEC now flies. We are the greatest movers of leg and materials. We stay in hotels. And you know for security reasons you can no longer stay in anyhow hotel. You have to stay in a safe area. There are some places you cannot conduct exams without the physical presence of the police and the Nigerian Army.

“When you go to the East due to what I will call ethnic separatism; you go to the north where you have banditry and insurgency; how do you conduct exams in those areas? Thank God some state governments cooperate with us. If not for the military and the brigade command in Yobe and Borno States, we would not have been able to conduct examination. In the East, we thank the DSS. And generally all over the country, we thank the Inspector-General of Police. We take the exam to every nook and cranny of the country. Our exam is not such that you gather people together in one central location. There is no facility like that in Nigeria. Wherever the school is located, you must go there to conduct the examination. That is a great challenge. Even in some places where you don’t have banditry, gunmen or insurgency, the roads are not good. These are the challenges we have in trying to serve the Nigerian child.” (The PUNCH)

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