Abdulkabeer Tijani

Claim

In the early hours of today, a post by My School News NG, which claims that universities and polytechnics in Nigeria resume by September 7, went viral.

Roundcheck Findings

With information available, we were able to first detect that the above claim has only appeared on My school News and no such report elsewhere on the internet.

Since the declaration of Covid-19 has a global pandemic, our educational sector was also hit hard. In a recent report by UNESCO, we were made to understand that an estimated 1.725 billion learners have been affected as a result of school closures, representing about 99.9% of the world’s student population as of April 13th, 2020.

Conclusion

The claim is FALSE

By this token, there was a round table meeting yesterday between heads of tertiary institutions in Nigeria and Jamb official. One of the agreements was that all institutions have agreed to commence the 2020/2021 Post-Utme by September 7, 2020, and sad enough, this was the memorandum of understanding that My School News misconstrued to mean that institutions resume by September 7.

They assumed that post-utme could not be held in various institutions without the schools being opened for academics for the present students, and as we speak, that claim seems not to hold water. To date, the federal government has only directed graduating students in various secondary schools throughout the country to resume academics to write their terminating examination (WAEC). In contrast, none has been approved for tertiary institutions.