NECO has created educational apartheid, and it did it with a signature. Registrar Professor Dantani Ibrahim Wushishi signed a guideline that gives children of the rich seventy-six subjects and children of the poor sixteen subjects. If you are still in secondary school, wearing uniform paid for by your parents, you can register Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Edo, Efik, Ibibio NECO calls you internal candidate. If you are the okada rider in Kano, the apprentice in Onitsha, the housewife in Makurdi who saved thirty thousand naira to rewrite her future, you are external candidate, and NECO says you do not deserve any Nigerian language. Seventy-six for the privileged, sixteen for the poor. That is not an examination policy. That is class discrimination forbidden by Section 42 of our Constitution.
The question every Nigerian must now ask the Honourable Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, is simple. Sir, is this your policy? In 2022, the Federal Government under your ministry launched a new National Language Policy which directs that mother tongue must be the medium of instruction in basic schools. You championed it as a rescue plan for Nigerian languages facing extinction. How then can an agency under your ministry, in 2026, delete those same languages from its senior certificate? One arm of the ministry says teach Yoruba in primary one. Another arm says Yoruba cannot be examined in SSCE External. This is not coherence. This is institutional schizophrenia, and the Minister must resolve it before NECO drags the entire ministry into public ridicule.
The National Assembly cannot be silent either. The Senate Committee on Basic and Secondary Education and the House Committee on Education have oversight powers over NECO. They approve its budget. They confirm its leadership. If NECO can unilaterally create two categories of Nigerians seventy-six subjects for internal, sixteen for external without consulting the National Assembly, then what is the essence of oversight? The National Assembly recently debated a Nigerian Heritage Preservation Bill to protect indigenous knowledge systems. How can parliament debate preservation of heritage while NECO under its watch deletes the very languages that carry that heritage? The committees must summon the Registrar to explain this discrimination publicly. Nigerians deserve to hear why JAMB can examine one point seven million candidates on computer in Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, but NECO cannot examine less than one hundred thousand.
State Houses of Assembly must also find their voice, because the damage will land first in their states. Consider Oyo State. The Oyo State House of Assembly passed a law promoting Yoruba language in schools. Emmanuel Alayande College of Education in Oyo produces Yoruba teachers for all South-West states. To study Yoruba there, you need a credit in Yoruba. If NECO External does not offer Yoruba, where will second-chance candidates in Oyo get that credit? The same question goes to the Kano State House of Assembly, which has invested in Hausa language development, and to the Imo and Anambra State Houses of Assembly, which fund colleges that train Igbo teachers. NECO’s sixteen-subject list will empty the departments of Nigerian languages in Federal College of Education, Zaria, Federal College of Education, Eha-Amufu, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, and many others. State assemblies must pass resolutions condemning this and demanding restoration, because when those departments close for lack of candidates, it is their constituents who will lose jobs and their languages that will die.
There is a labour dimension that NECO has ignored. Nigeria already has a crisis of language teachers. Many secondary schools in Edo, Ebonyi, Katsina and Ogun have no qualified Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa teacher. They rely on graduates from Colleges of Education. If NECO cuts off the pipeline of candidates who need Nigerian language credits to enter those colleges, the teacher shortage will become a famine. UNESCO has warned that Igbo could face extinction within fifty years if deliberate action is not taken. The Federal Government knows this. Yet one of its own agencies is accelerating that extinction by telling private candidates that Igbo is not examinable. You cannot lament the death of a language while strangling those who want to teach it. That is hypocrisy.
There is also the economic fraud angle that anti-corruption agencies should examine. NECO charges thirty thousand naira per candidate for this external examination. For many, that is two months’ savings. Cybercafés across Benin, Aba, Ibadan and Kaduna had already started collecting money from candidates who specifically requested Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa before the sixteen-subject list went viral. Now those candidates are told their subject does not exist. Where does their money go? Is it refunded? Is it converted to another subject they never wanted? An examination body must be a trust. When you collect money for a service and then delete the service, you breach that trust. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission should be interested in this.
Finally, there is the identity contradiction that exposes how disconnected some agencies have become. In London, Birmingham, Houston and Toronto, Nigerian parents pay as much as fifty pounds per hour for their children to learn Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa online. Nollywood films in Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa are on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Showmax, earning foreign exchange and employing millions of youths. The National Orientation Agency spends millions preaching national unity and cultural pride. Yet at home, NECO says those languages are not worthy of examination. This is what happens when those we trusted with our educational future lose their sense of mission. We trusted NECO to be more Nigerian than WAEC. Today, WAEC GCE still offers Nigerian languages, while NECO, the homegrown alternative, has deleted them.
The ball is now in three courts. First, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, must show whether his National Language Policy was a policy or mere press statement. He must direct NECO to restore Nigerian languages immediately, because an agency under his ministry cannot be allowed to destroy what the ministry claims to protect. Second, the National Assembly must prove that oversight is not only about budget approval. The Senate and House Committees on Education must summon the Registrar, Professor Wushishi, to explain on live television why seventy-six subjects are good for children of the rich and sixteen are enough for children of the poor. Third, State Houses of Assembly from Oyo to Kano, from Imo to Edo, must defend their own laws promoting indigenous languages by passing resolutions rejecting this sixteen-subject apartheid.
If none of these three does anything, then we must accept the painful truth: those we trusted with our educational future have all agreed, by silence, that a Nigerian child can be educated without being Nigerian. And history will record that when NECO deleted Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, the Minister kept quiet, the National Assembly kept quiet, and the State Assemblies kept quiet. At that cybercafé in Ibadan, the young man asked, “Sir, where is Yoruba?” The answer must no longer come from me. It must come from the Minister, from the National Assembly, and from NECO itself.
Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá is a public affairs analyst and development writer.
