The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has been plunged into a fresh credibility crisis following allegations of widespread technical glitches, administrative missteps, and last-minute score adjustments during the conduct and grading of the 2026 Computer-Based West African Senior School Certificate Examination (CB-WASSCE).
The controversy deepened after Olanrewaju Fadehan, Head of Examinations at WAEC’s Anambra State office, went public with claims that candidate performance was severely undermined by structural failures.
Fadehan revealed that the examination body engaged in last-minute interventions just before announcing the results on August 5, 2026, after initial publication plans hit technical barriers.
“Obviously, there was a problem because the press was eagerly waiting on Monday, the scheduled date. There was a need to quickly do some last-minute adjustments. Something was wrong,” Fadehan said in a video statement.
According to the official, candidates who sat the computer-based category suffered the worst disruptions, particularly in core subjects including Mathematics, English Language, and Igbo.
“The call for a review this year is particularly disturbing, as it is alarming. Schools that subscribed to the CBT innovation of WAEC were badly hit. Some of them spent upwards of N60m and above to set up their CBT facilities,” he stated, adding that logistics failures—such as providing inadequate calculators—severely impacted candidates taking quantitative subjects.
Fadehan confirmed he has formally petitioned the WAEC Board, the House of Representatives Committee on Basic Education, and the Minister of Education. Claiming he was placed on interdiction for raising internal red flags, he called directly on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to institute an independent investigation into the examination body’s operations and financial transactions.
WAEC is yet to respond to the latest claims regarding the results.
Mounting backlash over grading metrics
The internal disclosure follows weeks of vocal protests from school administrators, civil society groups, and legal representatives who questioned the integrity of the 2026 exercise.
Multiple school directors reported glaring disparities where students who scored above 300 out of 400 in the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) were awarded D7, E8, or F9 grades in core WASSCE subjects.
Sam Abdulazeez, a school director, noted that despite 30 out of 69 candidates in his school scoring over 300 in the UTME, only a fraction secured top grades in WASSCE Mathematics and English. He linked the collapse to server connectivity failures during pre-exam mock runs and raised questions over WAEC’s question serialization system.
“When last year’s result was released, I had already gone to publish the result, only for some people to call me that it’s like they have made some changes,” Abdulazeez said, recalling how 2025 scores inexplicably shifted upward weeks after release. “When we checked the result back again, we saw that those who they gave B had moved to A1. Those who they gave C moved to B.”
Legal pressure has also escalated. The Initiative for School Excellence and Education Foundation, through Zuriel Law Practice, issued a 14-day pre-action notice to WAEC. The foundation demanded the immediate preservation of all candidate response databases, server audit trails, and raw electronic logs to prevent altering records ahead of potential judicial review.
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