President Bola Tinubu has been strongly urged to intervene directly and cancel the newly introduced N4,000 result verification fee imposed by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council (NECO) on candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions.

The controversial policy requires prospective higher education students to pay the levy to verify their O’Level results, a move that critics and civil society groups have condemned as an objectionable financial burden on struggling families. With nearly two million candidates sitting for recent national examinations, the combined bodies stand to generate approximately N7.84 billion from this single exercise.

Opponents argue that students have already paid mandatory examination fees to obtain their academic qualifications and should not be forced to pay an additional fee simply to verify documents issued by the examination bodies themselves.

This latest charge comes shortly after the Federal Ministry of Education suspended a previous, ill-conceived proposal by WAEC and NECO to hike basic examination registration fees from N27,000 to N50,000. Stakeholders maintain that the examination agencies are attempting to smuggle in commercialized, revenue-generating policies under the guise of technological upgrades and administrative efficiency.

Education advocates emphasize that access to basic and higher education is a fundamental social right rather than a commercial luxury. Comparing Nigeria to neighboring West African countries like Ghana and Sierra Leone, which fully subsidize school certificate examination fees for their youths, observers argue that the Nigerian government must adopt a similar protective approach.

President Tinubu is urged to immediately abolish the N4,000 fee, prevent academic certification bodies from acting as revenue-collecting toll gates, and treat public education as an indispensable national investment.