Governor of the State of Osun, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, today described as shameful Thursday’s violent conducts of some students of high schools in Ife, Iwo and Ikire over their failure to qualify for the State Government’s sponsorship of the registration for the West African Examination Council (WAEC) fees.

He said it was unthinkable that students who failed examinations and should be remorseful, face the challenges of correcting their academic poor performances could go out and vandalise government property in the name of protests.

In a statement by the Director, Bureau of Communication and Strategy, Office of the Governor, Mr. Semiu Okanlawon, the Osun Government said its refusal to register the students for the West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) was because of their performance. He said it would be irresponsible to continue to fund examination registrations of students who didn’t demonstrate readiness to pass.

“The Government of Osun, in the unmistakeable resolve and determination to bring the best out of the students, has said it ‎will henceforth register only final year students for external examination after the conduct of the in-house mock examination. Students who fail to demonstrate their potential success at the final examination by scoring credits in at least four subjects will not be paid for by the government. Any parent who wants to gamble can register their children,” Okanlawon said.

The statement added that it is a verifiable fact that Osun under Aregbesola has turned around the education sector with the provision of a conducive environment, building of the state- of-the- art schools and the investment in training and retraining of teacher‎s.

It noted that against this backdrop, government expected ‎significant improvement in the average performance of its registered students in both WASCE and National Examination Council (NECO).

The statement said” “It is this decision of government that some disgruntled few among the students ‎went to the streets to protest against in Ile-Ife and Iwo. Whereas government decision was first and foremost informed on ‎the need to seek better performance of the students. Besides, the economic realities no longer permits wastage of resources.

“Thus government wanted only those who will excel after its investment on them and not those who will fritter away the meagre resources‎ by performing abysmally in the examination.”

Okanlawon noted that when the Aregbesola administration took over in November 2010, the performance of students in May/June WASCE result for that year was 15.68%. He added that the average performance for the three years (2011-2013) of Aregbesola administration was 21.32%, representing an improvement of 36% compared with the result of 2010.

The statement stressed that, compared with the average performance (13.26%) of the three years that preceded Aregbesola, the percentage improvement in performance of the Aregbesola years is a whopping 61%.

It described this as a significant achievement considering the challenges the state had to contend with, especially with regard to low morale among teachers, students’ indiscipline and parents that were largely lacking in discharging their parental responsibilities.

The Osun Government warned that it will no longer condone any act of indiscipline and irresponsibility on the part of the young ones, warning that full weight of the law will be applied if such lawless repeats itself.

•Photo shows Governor Aregbesola dressed like a student during a visit to an Osun school.

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