Nigeria's poor showing in the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination has prompted a senior official of the West African Examinations Council to question the quality of teachers and learning infrastructure in Nigerian schools.

Dr Amos Dangut, Head of the Nigeria National Office of WAEC, raised the concerns during a press briefing at the council's national office in Yaba, Lagos, calling for a critical review of human and material resources available in Nigerian schools.

His remarks came after Ghanaian students dominated the 2025 WASSCE, producing the top three candidates among 2,612,830 candidates from The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. At the 74th Annual Council Meeting of WAEC held in March, three Ghanaian students, Huda Suleman, Paula Suwo, and Matthea Andoh, were adjudged to have recorded the highest cumulative scores in the examination for school candidates.

Dangut questioned whether Nigerian schools possessed adequately qualified teachers and well equipped laboratories to support effective teaching and learning.

"When you talk of humans, do the schools have adequately qualified teachers? This is a question to answer. The facilities, are there sufficient examination facilities? Are the laboratories well equipped? Is the environment conducive to teaching and learning? And so on," he stated.

The WAEC official clarified the council's role, noting that its responsibility was to supply data that education planners and managers could use to formulate policies.

"So if in these few years we are observing this, ours is to provide the data, the information. And it is for education planners and managers to take it and formulate policies that will change it. We are not really a research organisation," he disclosed.

Dangut acknowledged that Ghana's dominance was a recent development, adding that Nigeria had previously produced top WASSCE candidates. "You see, the world is dynamic. If you follow the trend in performance, there were times Nigerians were the ones collecting all the prizes," he noted.

The 2025 WASSCE results revealed that only 754,545 of the 1,969,313 Nigerian candidates who sat the examination obtained credits and above in at least five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics, representing 38.32% of the total.