Fresh data from the National Examinations Council (NECO) has shown that Kano State ranked among the bottom ten states in this year’s internal Senior School Certificate Examinations (SSCE), contrary to Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s recent claim that the state emerged the best-performing.
Governor Yusuf had, in a Facebook post last week, said Kano topped the national ranking, attributing the performance to what he described as his administration’s commitment to education. His claim was widely reported in the media.
However, an analysis of NECO’s official results published by Premium Times revealed that only 49.84 percent of Kano’s 136,762 candidates secured five credits including English and Mathematics – the basic benchmark for university admission in Nigeria. This placed the state 29th out of 37 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
By contrast, Abia State emerged top with 83.31 percent of its 11,260 candidates meeting the benchmark. Lagos and Oyo, which the governor had claimed trailed Kano, recorded higher pass rates of 71.76 percent and 60.07 percent respectively.
Although Kano had the highest number of candidates, accounting for over 10 percent of those who sat for the exams nationwide, it contributed only about 5 percent of the successful candidates because more than half of its students failed.
Education experts say the governor may have mistaken the number of candidates who passed in absolute terms for overall performance, as NECO’s data also highlighted Kano’s large pool of students.
As of Friday, the Kano State Government had yet to react to the contradiction between Governor Yusuf’s statement and the official examination statistics.