A former President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Umar Abdulahi, has again debunked insinuations that Hausa language was not offered as a subject in the Cambridge/West Africa School Certificate Examination in 1961.
This came even as the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, now known as Cambridge Assessment, confirmed on Friday that it offered Hausa along with some other African languages in the 1961 WASC examination.
A statement on the Cambridge Assessment’s website on Friday had read in part, “According to the Regulations for 1961, African Language papers, including those for Hausa, were set for the West African School Certificate.”
The allegation that Hausa was not offered by Cambridge/WASC in 1961 became a talking point after the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate in the February election, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), obtained and released a copy of the master list of results of his 1961 set at the Provincial Secondary School, Katsina (now Government College, Katsina).
Abdulahi, who earlier confirmed that himself and some other prominent Nigerians wrote the final WASC examinations at the Provincial Secondary School, in Katsina, also confirmed to our correspondent on Sunday that his set wrote Hausa paper.
“There were a lot of options. There was Hausa, there was Arabic language in 1961,” he said.