The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, in this interview on Channels Television’s breakfast programme, The Morning Brief, spoke on topical issues in the education sector, including exam malpractices in national examinations, teachers’ training, alleged corruption in the Nigeria Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), among others.

Enjoy the excerpts…

It was reported on the front pages of newspapers on Tuesday that 1.5 million candidates scored below 200 in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination. So, this speaks to the learning outcomes at the senior secondary school level. What are your thoughts?

That’s a big concern, and it’s a reflection of exams being done the proper way. The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board conducts its exam using computer-based testing. They’ve put so much security in place that fraud or cheating has been eliminated. Now, we don’t have the same in our other exams, like the West African Examination Council.

National Examination Council, and that’s why, if you followed us at the Ministry of Education immediately after we got in there, well over six months ago, we did a complete diagnosis of exams, the way exams are conducted in the country. I set up a committee to look into it, and I’m getting the report from the committee in the next few days. But basically, what we need to do is to institute computer-based testing for WAEC, NECO, and the National Business and Technical Examinations Board.

I am happy to report to the nation that by November of this year, WAEC and NECO will migrate their exams to computer-based testing. We have to use technology to fight this fraud. We have a lot of centres called ‘miracle centres,’ which is not acceptable. So, what you’re seeing now is that people cheat in the secondary school exam system – WAEC and NECO – and then they now go to take UTME, where they cannot cheat, and that’s a reflection of what we’re seeing today.

It’s sad, and the more important thing about cheating is that you disincentivise the hardworking pupils. If I were a pupil now, and I’m reading for an exam, for WAEC or NECO, and I realise that some of my other colleagues already have the questions, do you think I’ll read? No, I’ll join them. So, the good ones, you’re going to make them bad, and that’s what we have to stop completely, zero tolerance to exam malpractices in our country, and by the year 2027, all exams will be fully CBT – WAEC, NECO.

Let’s diagnose this problem even further. That 70 per cent or 77 or so per cent of those people who sat for the exam is very alarming and literally should put everybody on their toes. So, from your diagnosis or what you’ve seen, is this a question of strict vigilance to catch people that are cheating, or are pupils no longer learning in that sense, and whichever it is you choose, are we concerned about the fact that pupils are not learning anymore? Perhaps there’s not enough motivation? Is that something you’re also looking into?

Yes, we’re looking into everything and I’ll tell you, we’ve done so much to improve quality of teaching using all forms, including technology, now using online in schools, from primary, junior secondary school (JSS), senior secondary school but the pervasive thing here is the rampant cheating that goes on in high school exam system and I don’t mind laundering our dirty linen in public but that’s how we have to improve our system.

The pervasive cheating in NECO and WAEC exams is what’s causing this thing, this mess that we’re in. When you allow these (exam) questions to leak, there’s a complete lack of motivation for even the pupils who want to do the right thing. We have a lot of young citizens, they’re very energetic, they’re very productive, they’re smart.

It’s in their DNA to do well, but it’s the environment they found themselves and that’s what we are determined to stop. And we’ve made quick progress in stopping this, and we’re going to be very forceful about this because we have a youthful population that we’re training to be useful, to deliver to the country and the world at large.

So, we can’t allow this pervasiveness to continue in our education system, and that’s why we’re frontally tackling this major menace in the way our exams are conducted. I’ve had multiple meetings with the registrar of WAEC and NECO, as well as others, and they’re all in sync. As I said earlier, in November, WAEC and NECO exams will be done via CBT; there’s no going back on that.

Indeed, exam malpractice is a major issue. We’ve heard cases that even parents or guardians willingly register their children or wards at centres where they will be able to perpetrate exam malpractice. So, yes, that is indeed the case, but the major contributor, some would say, is the education system itself, and yes, by all means, go after exam malpractice, let’s bring it to a halt. But the education system itself is a big issue. What kind of education are these pupils getting? Looking at this holistically, perhaps you speak to us as to what you’re doing to ensure that the education system itself is overhauled.

Yeah, we’re looking at it holistically, and we’re overhauling and we’ve overhauled several things. I wanted to just be very narrow there to address this big issue of exam practice, and then you’ve brought out several things. The entire ecosystem in the way cheating happens in our exam system, I’ll talk a little bit about that but let me talk about what we’re doing in the education system.

We revamped the curriculum of our JSS, and then the primary school curriculum and junior secondary school curriculum. We’ve infused 13 trades into the curriculum, and these will take effect in September of this year. As you know, things are changing, education is changing by the day, by the minute, and we have to catch up.

Also, we’re increasing the digital literacy in the country, the President has mandated that by the year 2030, 50 million more Nigerians should be digitally literate. So, we’re doing a lot in those areas, and, we’re refurbishing the schools. Beyond improving infrastructure, we’re also delivering more instructional materials to our pupils.

The Universal Basic Education Commission is currently being reformed to deliver what we want at a foundational level. We’re moving more from just exam-based testing to competency testing, professional testing. We are also using other forms of technology; we’re infusing artificial intelligence in our education system.

So, a lot is being done to continue to improve the quality of our education system. Are we there yet? No, but we’ve made tremendous progress in these areas, and as we continue to do that, we’re also motivating our children. We’re also retraining our teachers. If you look at the six-point agenda, which I’ll just mention briefly because we don’t have that much time today, we have as priority number one, expansive technical vocational education and training, which we will launch in the next few weeks.

Our second focus area is our expansive STEMM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medical Sciences, STEMM with two Ms. Number three, reducing the burden of out-of-school children, where we’ve instituted several interventions, and we’re seeing results in those areas.

Number four, girl child education. We’re focusing on girl child education, we’ve launched the Lumina programme that the Minister of State is leading, and the other things that are beneath that.

We have an entire agenda to reduce the number of girl children who are out of school. We have this big World Bank credit that we’re using – adolescent girls’ initiative for learning and empowerment. We had a phase one, where we had seven states, and now, in the second phase, we added 11 more states, so there are 18 states benefiting from that.

We’re getting good results, and the responses from our governors, they’re doing well on this. Our governors at the subnational level are on top of this. They’re happy with the programme.

When will the second phase be inaugurated?

I’ll be happy to inform the nation that the first lady of the federation, Her Excellency, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, will be launching the second phase, the additional financing, on Children’s Day, which I believe is May 27. Then our fifth priority area is data and digitalisation. We can’t move if we don’t start using data to look at where our problems are, intervene, and monitor outcomes.

So, we have an expansive data and digitalisation plan that we christened NEDI (Nigeria Education Data Initiative). We’ve engaged one of the top five international consultants to support our agenda here, and we plan to deploy the first dashboard.

With this NEDI programme, all our education data will be on one platform, from the foundational level to our tertiary education level. We can begin to analyse, aggregate, and disaggregate this data and see where we’re failing and where we need to intervene.

And of course, number six is quality assurance in the kind of education we’re giving our children, and also the quality of teachers who are giving this education to our children. We have a big agenda to change the way we’re doing teacher professional development, from just giving a lump sum of money to SUBEB, we’re going to use technology, we’re going to get our teachers to use online training and do the exams.

When they pass those exams, we will directly incentivise them by paying them some money for undergoing their professional training. So, that will happen from the beginning of this year.

I’ll browse through what we’re doing to improve the quality of education in the country. We have a president, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who believes so much in human capital development, and when we talk about human capital development, what are we talking about? Education is the centre point. The President has given us so much support that we need to improve the quality of our education.

I would like you to dwell more on the problem of cheating in our exam system.

With the entire ecosystem in cheating, it involves the parents, pupils, teachers, and the invigilators, and we’re going to break that vicious cycle. The easiest and quickest way to break that vicious cycle is to use technology, and that’s why we will migrate to CBT for these exams.

The parents are Involved, pupils are involved, teachers are involved, and invigilators are involved as well. And as I told you earlier, with the committee that I set up to do a comprehensive diagnostic review and come up with robust recommendation, that committee is led by Professor (Ishaq) Oloyede, the registrar of JAMB and I’m awaiting their report which I should get this week and we will implement every single detail, every single recommendation in that report that will ensure that our exams are free and fair.

What is the mechanism that your ministry is using to monitor the efficacy of the work of the Almajiri commission on the one hand? On the other hand, there is also the nonformal education approach that the commission is deploying to educate those who can be taken off the streets. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of education itself, which is to give these children formal education that will equip them for the future?

Now, depending on the data you are looking at. You are talking about the total number of out-of-school children. You just quoted 18.5 million children out of school. The data we’re using is 15 million, but I can tell you today, the number of out-of-school children is going down, and I’ll tell you what we’ve done. Now, this is the whole essence of data.

Before we came into the ministry, we had a lot of data and now we’re using data that international organisations are quoting to us and that’s why we’ve moved so quickly to start getting our data because if we don’t have our data that we can validate and trust, we cannot even begin to measure, to monitor the efficacies of our intervention.

We now have the Almajiri and out-of-school commission, and this commission, the people who designed this law, I’ll give them all the credit here. They designed this commission not only as a regulatory commission but a commission that can operate a school. We have a very active executive secretary of the commission who was also an almajiri himself.

We brought out several interventions, and we’re moving kids off the streets into school. We’ve done some intervention in the FCT. We moved almost 30,000 children from the streets to our school system.

We’re doing mapping of where these almajiri schools and as we continue to do this, we’ve also set up I’ve also set up a high ministerial committee so that we’re all working every single agency that is dealing with out-of-school children, we have a monthly ministerial meeting and we have a technical working group that meets so often.

We also have the World Bank credit that just got approved, a $550 million credit for us for the HOPE basic education, HOPE means human opportunity for prosperity and equity.

What exactly is going on with the NELFUND issue? What have you heard from the institutions themselves? What should we be expecting as a final report as far as that issue is concerned? Do you think there’s corruption going on, or what exactly is happening?

Thank you so much. Let me address this. NELFUND reports to me, so I’ve taken brief from everybody, and this morning (Tuesday), after my interview with you, I’ll be meeting with the vice chancellors of all the universities that were reported to have been affected by this news about some money not going to the right place. We have to be thankful to President Bola Tinubu for his wisdom in quickly moving to set up NELFUND.

NELFUND is delivering to our children, they’re benefiting from it. It’s opening access to education, well over half a million students are benefiting. It’s a legacy intervention and we want to continue to expand this access now, and as you know, this administration and my ministry have zero tolerance for fraud, for corruption, but there’s been a lot of sensationalisation in the news on their funds in the last few days. The ICPC, in the first report they released, said almost N70 billion of the N100 billion that was released to NELFUND was not used to service children’s education. They retracted that report.

What do you think prompted the report?

The ICPC chairman is a man of high integrity and credibility. I don’t know how that report came out, but they retracted that report. So, that’s not the case. There were anomalies that happened, but not a case of obvious looting of government money. What happened here was that there are two ways in the NELFUND loan system; they give monthly stipends to students, about 20,000 gets paid directly to their account, and then the student fees.

We don’t have tuition in our federal institutions. The fees, ranging from accommodation and other kinds of fees, are paid directly to the universities. What should happen is that as soon as the university gets those fees, it should notify the students that NELFUND has paid their fees.

The students who have paid should be refunded, and there should be a timeline for them to get the refund. Those who have not paid the fees should be notified that NELFUND has paid the fees, so they don’t need to pay. But what we’re seeing is that the fees, sometimes running into hundreds of millions of naira, are paid to the universities, but they don’t notify the students.

The students are anxious that their fees have not been paid, and there’s no connection. That’s why we’ve quickly set up guidelines which we’ll be discussing with the universities.

I’ve reviewed those guidelines, and we will now give reporting timelines on when a university gets any fee from NELFUND, the duration of time they need to inform the student, and the students who have paid, when they need to pay them back.

The ones who haven’t paid would need to be informed that their fee has been paid. So, that’s what we’re doing. It’s not the case of people just looting. That was exactly what happened, and I’m clarifying this to Nigerians.

It wasn’t a case of N100 billion getting released to NELFUND and N70 billion looted. Absolutely not! That would not happen. With the process that we have now, there’s no mechanism for that to ever happen. (Channels TV)