The National Examination Council (NECO) has indefinitely postponed the 2020 Senior Secondary School Certificate Examinations due to the current security challenges occasioned by the #EndSARS protests in the country and curfew imposed by some states.
The Head of the Information and Public Relations Division, NECO, Azeez Sani, made the announcement in a statement on Sunday, titled, ‘Indefinite postponement of the 2020 ongoing Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (Internal).’
It reads partly, “The Governing Board of the National Examinations Council at its special meeting on Thursday October 22 2020 reviewed the on-going 2020 SSCE(Internal) nationwide.
“The council had in a press release, dated October 21 2020, informed the general public of rescheduling some papers of the 2020 on-going SSCE.
“Arising from that meeting, the Governing Board resolved that the 2020 SSCE (Internal) be postponed indefinitely in view of the current security challenges, occasioned by the #EndSARS protests, which disrupted the smooth conduct of the examinations in some parts of the country.
“In making this decision, the Board noted that due to these security challenges: some state governments imposed a curfew and closed schools in order to safeguard lives and property.
“In the circumstances, it has become difficult for the council to move examination materials across the country. Students in the affected locations were unable to sit for the papers already scheduled in the examination time table.”
The #EndSARS protest according to Wikipedia is a decentralised social movement and series of mass protests against police brutality in Nigeria. The slogan calls for the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a notorious unit of the Nigerian Police with a long record of abuses.
The protests which take its name from the slogan started in 2017 as a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #ENDSARS to demand the disbanding of the unit by the Nigerian government.
After experiencing a revitalisation in October 2020 following more revelations of the abuses of the unit, mass demonstrations occurred throughout the major cities of Nigeria, accompanied by vociferous outrage on social media platforms.
About 28 million tweets bearing the hashtag have been accumulated on Twitter alone. Solidarity protests and demonstrations by Nigerians in diaspora and sympathizers occurred in many major cities of the world. The protests are notable for its patronage by a demographic that is made of entirely young Nigerians.
