This is the concluding part of the interview with the Registrar of the National Examinations Council (NECO), Professor Promise Okpalla, which was last published on 5 January, 2012.

What is your reaction to the allegation that NECO  management is in the habit of owing its examiners and that this may have been  partly responsible  for the poor marking of the Council’s candidates’ scripts?
No, that is not true, because when you look at the delay in  payment  of allowances , a good number of people showed up when it became compulsory  that even if it is  N1.00 you want to collect, it  must be through e-payment. Otherwise,  prior to that, we could ask a bank to go to the marking venue and let them all line up and be paid at the respective centres. But, we no longer do that here; the rule now is that even if it is N1.00, the person must open an account with a bank and the money we are paying him must be transferred electronically.

However, we are still experiencing some problems with these clients. A sizeable number of them filled their account numbers  as if that was the first time they were hearing about bank and getting involved in banking activities; some did not fill their names correctly, while some others wrote their names where the account numbers should have been and when you see 0803, this looks like a GSM number, and no bank would be in a hurry to drop money into an account whose name begins with figures like that. Sometimes, the banks would say some accounts were dormant or that the person is not the real owner of the account and when you investigate further, you might discover that the client used his wife or husband’s account number.

So, we have continued to move forward and backward and, naturally, these  people, no matter how  few they were, would make maximum noise about it. Majority did not talk because there is no need for them to talk, we have paid them for the job done. But no matter who they are or whatever they night have said about us, they are still our clients and it is not good for me not to pay them.

So, we have been trying to pay them and during the last exercise, whatever we wanted to do, we gave them orientation. As of now, we are proud to say that to tackle the issue, we came up with an arrangement where we gave them semi- permanent dates and they have been collecting their payments through electronic banking . However, the problem borders on  how enlightened an average Nigerian adult is and we are trying to better this arrangement so that we can pay our customers on time.

What is the current cost of conducting exams by NECO?
Well, the current cost of conducting our exams is a social cost because we are in a country whereby education is seen as a social responsibility to be provided by the government of the  day. If an examination body is operating as a non-governmental  establishment, you will realise that the issue of social cost will not come into play. The charges we operate on are those approved by the Federal Government. No matter what you think about it, we don’t  charge our unit cost from here at NECO headquarters and if anybody says it ends here, it is not true. The best we can do is to provide working paper, just to make our request. That request passes through certain processes and since NECO is an extended arm of government, we all operate under the same social window with that of the government. Also, because we belong to the government of the day, there is a limit to which we can go to source for funds. So, any funds we want to create, we must go and alert our superiors because we are managers and an approval must be secured. Therefore, we are not into funds generation. So, on the issue of costs, we are conscious of the fact  that this organisation is an extension of government, with rules and regulations and what we are operating is not an economic cost. However, we will need social grants to confront some challenges like the issue of utility vehicles, and ICT, in which a scanning machine costs up to 13 or 14 million Naira, and there is no way  the money we get from the students’ exams can really take care of them, it is not possible. It  will take a lot to change our old scanners  which are around 1999 models.

Can NECO be compared with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board where  universities and tertiary institutions matriculation exams can be conducted in a  day and the results could be released same day?
Not at all, because it is not real  or proper to compare NECO with JAMB. JAMB is a one-day exam, it operates on multiple choice only, whereas, our exams lasts for over 40 days. JAMB’s subjects are only   four, while NECO subjects are nine and we deal with both the JSS and SSS students. Unlike JAMB which  exams are only objectives, NECO exams are objectives, essay, summary and practical.

Therefore, the two examination bodies are not comparable in terms of examination demands. There is no way we can mark our exams within 21 days because it is not feasible. To mark our essays, we use about 70,000 marking scripts. That one is the normal thing we can do. The best we have succeeded in doing is to knock down the time of releasing the results to two months, which is approximately 60 days, and that is the best we can do. That alone costs a lot of energy and a lot of grace. An exam like A’ Level and our common entrance exams  into either JSS 1 or SS1, we can do under 24 hours and we will hand over the results to appropriate authorities on demand.