Hours after the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) released the 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results, Educare CEO Alex Onyia took to X, alleging a serious glitch in the results, particularly for candidates who sat the Computer-Based Testing (CBT) option.
“WAEC, you can’t toy with our children’s destinies,” Onyia wrote, demanding that the results be withdrawn and corrected immediately or face a court challenge. His post drew thousands of views and dozens of replies within three hours, many from parents and students echoing his concern.
WAEC announced on Wednesday that 1,200,514 candidates, representing 61.54% of those who sat the exam, obtained credits in at least five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics, a 1.42 percentage-point drop from 2025. Close to 1.96 million candidates from 24,207 schools across Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Côte d’Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea had registered for the exam, which ran from Apr 21 to Jun 19.
The results come months after WAEC’s National Office head, Dr Amos Josiah Dangut, promised there would be no repeat of the glitches that forced the council to temporarily withdraw 2025 WASSCE results over a flawed paper-serialisation system. Dangut said the identified issues had been corrected, and disclosed that CBT adoption grew from fewer than 40 schools in 2025 to about 450 in 2026. WAEC has yet to publicly respond to Onyia’s latest allegation.
A familiar fight for Alex Onyia
This is not the first time Onyia has taken on a Nigerian exam body over alleged system failures. During the 2025 UTME crisis, he publicly disputed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s (JAMB) account that the widespread score anomalies were a mere “glitch,” calling it instead a flawed fraud-detection algorithm and pointing to candidates whose scores swung wildly between sittings. He also said he had heard from over 100 students who described suicidal thoughts over their results, an account that pushed JAMB to set up a probe of thousands of affected candidates. JAMB’s subsequent review vindicated several of his concerns.
Onyia’s history of amplifying student grievances into institutional pressure and his track record of being proven right on JAMB are likely part of why his latest post on the WAEC results has spread quickly among parents and candidates. Whether WAEC’s 2026 CBT rollout has, in fact, produced errors on the scale he describes remains to be independently verified.
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