North East Candidates to Re-Sit WAEC in Nigeria.

Tens of thousands of candidates for the May/June 2013 West African Examinations Council (WAEC) exams from the North East would have to re-sit them, the exams body announced yesterday.

Head of the WAEC National Office (Nigeria), Charlse Eguridu said this while releasing the results for this year's examinations in Lagos yesterday.

He said the candidates' scripts were lost in the violence that took place in the region during the period of the examination.

Management, he said, had resolved that such candidates would, however, be considered for the re-write of the affected subjects at no cost.

Announcing the results at a press briefing, Eguridu said insurgency attacks led to the misplacement of examinationscripts and loss of three WAEC staff, making the management unable to declare full results for the May/June exams.

The results of 145,505 candidates, representing 8.62 percent could not be fully processed, and a larger chunk of the number is made up of those affected by insurgency attacks.

He said while the attacks lasted, it was discovered that some vehicles conveying the examination scripts were raided by insurgents and the missing scripts have not been found.

Boko Haram insurgents had launched series of attacks on schools in Borno and Yobe states killing scores of students and teachers, and destroying infrastructure.

In one such instance, gunmen killed many students of Monguno Secondary School in Borno State by slitting their throats, after laying an ambush for them as they returned home from centres where they wrote the WAEC Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) in April.

Shortly before that, six secondary school teachers, including a principal were killed in the same area.

Eguridu said: "We are unable to provide statistics of candidates who obtained credit and above in five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics at this time, because many candidates in the north eastern part of the country have partial results at the moment, due to security challenges encountered there during the conduct of the examination, particularly loss of scripts," Eguridu said.