A deepening standoff between private school operators and the Ogun State government is threatening to shut over 700,000 senior secondary students out of this year’s West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), as a dispute over a mandatory student identification process escalates into a full-blown education crisis.
Private school owners across the state are raising urgent alarms, warning that at least 70 percent of their SS3 students may be unable to sit the examination if the government does not immediately relax its requirement that all WASSCE candidates possess a Learner Identification Number (LIN) — a unique code issued through the state’s education portal.
A Platform in Chaos
While the government frames the LIN policy as a routine data-gathering exercise, school proprietors say the real problem lies in a chaotic digital migration that has left thousands of students’ records either missing or inaccessible.
“We were formerly on OGSERA, but we recently migrated to DIPER,” one school source told YouNews. “There have been so many problems with the platform — students whose names were originally registered can no longer be found on the system.”
Proprietors argue that the timeline between the policy rollout and its enforcement deadline is simply too tight to resolve these technical failures in time. “The government should allow us to register these children,” the source added. “The time they rolled out these policies and the time for implementation is too short.”
School owners are now calling on the state government to suspend the LIN requirement for this examination cycle, cautioning that a failure to act could leave a generation of students without their school-leaving certificates.
Government Pushes Back — Hard
Education authorities in Ogun State are not backing down, and their response has been pointed. Officials insist that the LIN process is not new, that all schools have had ample time to comply, and that the outcry from private school owners masks deeper, more troubling motivations.
“The proprietors are simply being economical with the facts,” a senior education official said. “The process of issuing LINs is designed to ensure that only bonafide, registered students of approved schools are enrolled on the Ministry’s portal — for data gathering, policy planning, and decision-making.”
The official went further, accusing a significant number of private school operators of using the controversy as cover to continue evading taxes and levies, and — more seriously — to perpetuate examination malpractice. “Majority of the private school owners are out to sabotage the process,” the official alleged. “Let them stop making mountains out of molehills.”
Thousands of Students Caught in the Crossfire
With the WASSCE window rapidly approaching, it is the students — not the institutions or the regulators — who stand to bear the heaviest consequences. For many, this examination represents years of academic work and a critical gateway to university admission and future opportunity.
YouNews understands that technical glitches and compressed timelines are at the heart of the operational failure, even as the government maintains that broader compliance and integrity issues cannot be ignored.
As both sides dig in, pressure is mounting for an urgent resolution before the examination date arrives — and before hundreds of thousands of young people in Ogun State are left on the wrong side of a bureaucratic crisis they had no hand in creating.
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