Photo credit: the Leadership
Sometime in August, the National Examinations Council (NECO) invited examiners to mark the Senior Secondary Certificate Examination theory papers. The examinations were held in May/June.
The examiners went to the marking centres from far and near. Most of them were not after monetary gains but they wanted to be more abreast of the latest trends in their respective subjects.
The results have since been released.
However, the payment of the examiners’ stipends seems to be problematic for the body. Two centres were used for the marking exercise in Abeokuta, the Ogun state capital.
I understand that while examiners in one of the centres have been paid a seemingly long while ago, examiners in the other centre are still waiting for their miserly claims.
There were rumours that the payment voucher for the second centre got lost. However, one official in the account section of NECO dismissed the insinuation.
According to him, the flash drive of the payment was with him during the conversation. Indeed, according to him, markers who had accounts with a certain commercial bank were already being paid.
It turned out to be a rude shock that he was only spinning a time saving yarn.The bank in question was neither paying then nor has it paid till the close of work today.
One doesn’t really understand why the situation should have arisen in the first instance. The normal thing would have been to settle bills before releasing results.
Could the examination body be thinking of the November/December NECO GCE examinations before paying some of the examiners who took the pains to mark the last school examinations?
I sincerely hope not!
By the way, if any examiner had been so careless to even miscount the scripts to the extent that the number they returned was even less by just one, they could have been arrested.
So, who dares to arrest NECO? Certainly not the flotsam and jetsam which they believe teachers are.
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