Yesufu Says Students Should Stop Paying WAEC and NECO Fees After Government Approves N50,000 Rate

Aisha Yesufu has a straightforward position on examination fees in Nigeria, and she did not bury it.

The activist and politician took to X following news that the Federal Government had approved an increase in WAEC and NECO fees to N50,000 per candidate, effective from 2027, and said something that will resonate with millions of Nigerian families: no student in Nigeria should be paying those fees at all.

"No student in Nigeria should be paying for WAEC and NECO. Good quality education should be a right Nigerian children enjoy. Primary and secondary education is more beneficial to the state than the people. The cost of an uneducated populace is too high for a State," she wrote.

The Federal Ministry of Education approved raising the WAEC NECO fee increase for the Senior Secondary Certificate Examination to N50,000 per applicant. The approval was issued by Adeniji Ibrahim, Director of Senior Secondary Education at the Federal Ministry of Education, in a letter dated June 18, 2026. The new rate takes effect from 2027.

The increase has not been accompanied, at least not in any public announcement, by a corresponding expansion of government subsidies or scholarships to offset the cost for families who cannot afford it.

This is not simply an emotional reaction to a fee hike. There is a structural argument inside what Yesufu said, and it deserves to be unpacked.

Her point about primary and secondary education being more beneficial to the state than to individuals is grounded in basic public economics. An educated population produces more tax revenue, requires less state spending on social support, commits less crime, and generates more innovation. The returns to basic education are not primarily captured by the individual student. They are distributed across society. That is the classic argument for why the state should fund basic education rather than leaving it to families to pay for on their own.

When you layer exam fees on top of school fees, uniform costs, textbook costs, and transportation, you create a cumulative barrier that pushes children out of the education system entirely. Nigeria already has one of the highest out-of-school child populations in the world. The Borno school kidnapping story Infotresting covered recently, where students were abducted mid-NECO examination, was a reminder of how desperately many Nigerian families prioritise education even under extreme conditions. Raising the cost of sitting that examination sends the opposite signal.

N50,000 is not a trivial sum for the majority of Nigerian households. Against a backdrop where over 140 million Nigerians live below the poverty line, and where the cost of food, fuel, and basic goods has risen sharply over the past two years, asking a family to produce N50,000 per child just to sit their school-leaving examination is a significant burden. For families with multiple children in secondary school, the cumulative cost becomes genuinely prohibitive.

The WAEC NECO fee increase Nigeria 2026 is not the government's only option for funding examination bodies. WAEC and NECO could be funded directly from the education budget, with the examination being free at the point of use for students, as is the model in several countries where secondary examinations are a public good rather than a consumer product.

Whether that is politically or fiscally feasible given Nigeria's current budget constraints is a legitimate conversation. But the conversation should start with the principle Yesufu is asserting, that basic education and the certifications that go with it should not be gated behind fees that exclude the poor, and work backward from there to what it would actually cost to fund that principle.

The N50,000 rate is not yet in effect. It applies from 2027, which means there is still time for the government, the National Assembly, civil society groups, and parent bodies to push back on the increase or to secure compensating subsidies before it bites.

Yesufu's call for students to stop paying the existing fees is, realistically, more of a political provocation than an actionable instruction, since examination bodies do not register candidates without payment. But the underlying demand, that the Nigerian state should treat secondary education as a public good rather than a cost to be passed on to the poorest families, is one that is hard to argue against on principle.