The National Examination Council has said that the recent postponement of its examination for private candidates was
due to the Federal Government’s decision to declare a public holiday .
The body also dismissed the insinuation that this was the third time it postponed the examination, describing it as a
social media hoax and explaining that it had not released its timetable up until its publications appeared in the print and
broadcast media on Wednesday .
NECO’ s Director of Exam Administration, Mustapha Abdul, made this known in an
interview with our correspondent on Thursday . Stating that copies of the updated examination timetable had been emailed to candidates so that they would not suffer the fate of missing a paper, Abdul said ,
“ We planned our timetable based on the fact that we expected Wednesday to
be a holiday , that is the Eid-el-Maolud . However , the change was confirmed yesterday (Wednesday ), when we learn from an authoritative source that the Federal Government would declare Tuesday a public holiday , instead of Wednesday.”
“ Since we cannot have an examination on a public holiday, the best thing we could do was to shift it and notify the candidates. The examination would have started today. And if we had shifted the exams around without notifying the candidates, so many candidates would have missed their vital papers.”
“ So we needed to buy time for people to be notified of the change and not miss their papers . If there was no public holiday , there wouldn ’t have been a shift. We took this step because this is a private examination for people who really need to pass a subject that is required to gain admission to the university. If there is any mix – up and they miss a paper, it could be very devastating. That ’s why
we had to shift the examination to give people ample time to get better information. ”