The May/June 2014 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is on. But, no fewer than 30 candidates who registered with Mentors Secondary School in Ota, Ogun State, cannot write the exams. Reason: the school’s proprietor allegedly absconded with their registration fees. KOFOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE and MOJISOLA CLEMENT report.
•Proprietor absconds with registration fees
Agnes Kalu regrets the day her mother’s friend recommended that she enrols at Mentors Secondary School in Dalemo near Sango Ota in Ogun State as an external candidate for the May/June 2014 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).
But for that suggestion, she would have been sitting for the examination at Omole Senior Grammar School, Omole, where she is an SS3 pupil. At Omole, Agnes would not have paid a dime as the Lagos State Government sponsors SS3 pupils for the examination.
To register at Mentors High School, her mother paid N25,000 as WASSCE fees, N19,000 for specimen, logistics, form and some other sums for sundry expenses, totalling N47,500. To their dismay, the school proprietor, Mr Matthew Praise Akintayo, absconded with the money pupils of the school and external candidates paid for the examination. To make matters worse, the school is neither recognised by the Ogun State Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, nor the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
The case has since been reported to the Police, which have charged it to the Ota Magistrate’s Court.
At the court, Mrs Dora Akintayo, is standing trial on a 38-count charge of obtanining money from the candidates under false pretence and converting the money into personal use. She said to have committed the offence with her husband, who is now at large.
Some of the other victims are Olalekan Praise, Precious Ogundele, Femi Phillip, Igunmu Olasile, Mukaila Lateef, Daniel Abigael, Babatunde Dare, Amosun Gbemi, Omenai Victoria, Azeez Ganiyat, Ayeni Tosin, Abubakar Zainab, Yusuf Sunday, Sorunke Funto, Debedero Ibrahim, Babatunde Grace, Bernard Junior, Taiwo Bukunmi, and Oludele Tolani.
Agnes and others candidates are depressed that they have missed the examination. Some of them are hiding from their friends because of the shame of not writing the exams; others have resorted to lying over the fate.
The truth is that they have lost the chance to write the examination. The option left for them is to register for the November/December examination as private candidates.
Agnes said: “I came all the way from Lagos to enrol for my WAEC after hearing good testiomines about him (Akintayo) from his last students. He collected N25,000 for registration of the examination, N1,000 for the form, N500 for passport, and N2,000 for practicals. Later, I was told to pay N5,000 for logistics. I thought the school was registered. I did not know it was not registered.”
Olalekan Praise, a pupil of Mentors, said she was disappointed that her preparations since last year have been in vain.
“I paid N45,000 for my WASC but my proprietor did not register me for the WASC. I feel so sad and dejected because I started coaching lesson for this examination last October, and now the examination I prepared for, I was not allowed to write,” she said.
Mr Bukola Oludele is angry that his daughter, Tolani, would have to lose one year.
“I am not concerned about the money the man ran away with. I am very angry because of the time wasted; now my child is at home while her counterparts are writing the examination. She feels dejected and has been lying to her friends that she is also taking the examination,” he said.
Another parent, Mrs Esther Ogundele, said her daughter, Precious, has been downcast since the incident.
“Precious is worried that she would be in the same class with her younger sister who is already in SS2 next year. To her, it is like she is repeating a class again,” she said.
Parents say this was not the story last year. Mr Lekan Ayeni, a parent, said for the 2013 WASSCE, in line with the policy of WAEC’s policy not to conduct examinations for schools with low candidature (less than 20), the school partnered with another in its neighbourhood, Funmec College, to register its candidates for the examination. Ayeni said they expected to use the same school this year but were surprised when the story changed.
Ayeni said he suspected foul play when his daughter, Tosin, came home about three weeks to the examination with a spurious bill, yet no definite information about details of the examination centre.
“Last year, the students of Mentors wrote at Funmec International School, which is also in Dalemo. This year, they even used the Funmec school uniform to take passport photographs for the examination. We were all expecting them to use Funmec. But my daughter had been complaining that apart from taking photographs, they did not thumbprint or do any other registration. Later, the proprietor said they were not using Funmec again. But each time we asked which school they would use, he would say it would be sorted out. This continued until three weeks to the exam.
“The week before the examination, the proprietor, Akintayo, told the children to go home and get N8,000 for specimen, N5,000 for logistics, N5,000 for party, and N1,000 for mock examination, making N19,000 after we paid an initial N25,000. That was when I became suspicious,” he said.
He was not the only parent that kicked against the additional levies. Disagreements about the new bill led to an emergency meeting on March 29 during which Akintayo, who is now at large, insisted that parents pay the bill or their children would not be allowed to write the examination.
Mrs Ogundele said the urgency of the demand close to the start of the examination on April 1, made her to part with N15,000 so that her daughter, Precious, would not be adversely affected.
“We were asked to pay N15,000 again for logistics which all the parents said we did not have. Akintayo said the money was for specimen, practical, their end-of-the-year party and all that. He said if we did not pay, our children would not be allowed to write the examination. He also said he disallowed his sister-in law from writing a particular subject in the WAEC examination of last year because his father-in-law did not complete the payment. He said it was 10 minutes to the end of the paper that he got an alert from his bank that the money had been paid; that was when he allowed his sister-in-law to write the examination. His wife also confirmed it. So, we all looked at ourselves and said if he could do that to a close knit family, then surely he would do more than that to us,” he said.
However, she said the situation assumed an alarming dimension when Akintayo’s wife, Dora, who heads the nursery and primary arm, claimed that her husband had been kidnapped, a day to the start of the examination.
“It was the day I went to pay the money that the wife called me in the night crying that her husband had been kidnapped, and the next day was the beginning of the examination. But she calmed my nerves and told me that she would take the children to their centres that they should put on black skirt. On the day of the examination, the woman who was crying hysterically on the phone the day before was gorgeously dressed and she also made up her face and I was wondering about her claims that her husband has been kidnapped,” she said.
The worst was yet to come. On the D-day, the parents and candidates said Mrs Akintayo abandoned them at a petrol station at Ipaja.
Agnes said: “On April 2, the day of the first paper, Yoruba, she informed us that we were registered to write the exam at Ajasa at Ayola College. We went past the school and I was thinking there was another one with the same name. After some minutes, she said we have gone past our centre, so we turned back again. By that time we were already panicking because it was 8.30am and the Yoruba paper should have started.
“She left us under the sun and said she was going to look for the centre. Later, when we called her around 9am, she told us not to disturb her as she is still looking for the centre when the paper had started already. By 12pm, again, we called her and she said she was still looking for the centre. The teachers that followed us ran away. She later called one of the parents with us that she has found the centre. She called the place Ayola College, on getting to the place, we discovered Ayola was a street and not a school.”
But for the parents’ decision to follow the candidates that morning, Mr Ayeni said, they would have been stranded. He said most of them did not have money since they had paid N5,000 for logistics.
Mr Ayeni said: “Some parents decided to follow the candidates. I asked the proprietor’s wife for the details and after a lot of pressure, she told me the school was called Ayola High School at Ajasa Command in Alimosho Local Government. So, we went there; later, she said the school was in Ipaja, we followed her. She later abandoned the students at a petrol station and disappeared. I had to pay N1,800 and another N1,400 to transport them from Ipaja back to Sango. We first reported the case at Meiran Police Station, from where we were redirected to Sango Police Station, which has the jurisdiction over the area of the school.”
During the hearing of the case last Friday, Magistrate S.T. Bello, refused the plea of Mrs Akintayo’s father,….. to strike out the case. He appealed for the case to be struck out because he had refunded N420,000 of the money collected by the Akintayos. Magistrate Bello ruled that not all the victims had been accounted for and duly compensated. She, however, granted Mrs Akintayo bail and adjourned the case to May 21.
When The Nation checked the status of the Mentors High School with the Ogun State Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the Public Relations Officer, Mr Kayode Oduyebo, said the school is not registered, thereby illegal. He also said the ministry will formally take action against the school.
“The school is not approved. It will be shut and the proprietor invited to the ministry,” he said.
Shedding more light on the registration process, the Deputy Director, Public Affairs, Mr Yusuf Ari, said schools are only recognised by WAEC as examination centres after recommendations by the state Ministry of Education, and inspection by the council. In essence, he said the school cannot be registered by WAEC if it is not registered by the Ministry of Education.
“To get recognition from WAEC, a school has to get approval from the ministry to start operating. When its pupils are getting close to the examination classes, the ministry will write to WAEC and recommend that the school should be given recognition. But that recognition is not automatic. WAEC will inspect the schools and give full or partial recognition if they deserve it. Partial recognition means that the school cannot present candidates for examination in some subjects and we tell them what to do about it,” he said.
