Centre for Information Technology and Development, CITAD, on Tuesday says it has disqualified the three winners of the 5th round of essay writing competition after discovering the entries to have been lifted from online sources.
DAILY NIGERIAN reports that the competition, tagged; Students’ Essay, is an Anti-corruption and Accountability Project, introduced by the CITAD and supported by MacArthur Foundation to fight corruption from the grassroots.
The second project, tagged: Report a Project, gives contestants the chance to report abandoned projects in northern Nigeria in order to pressure governments to complete them.
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Speaking during the presentation of cash prizes to winners of the 5th round of Report a Project competition in Kano on Tuesday, the Programme Officer, Maryam Haruna disclosed that the judges discovered that one of them copied from an online article completely.
According to her, the other two contestants copied parts of some write-ups via the internet without giving reference to the sources.
While noting that plagiarism is itself an act of corruption, the program officer lamented that their acts were a snag to the efforts of fighting corruption from the grassroots.
Mrs Haruna, therefore, disclosed that the disqualified contestants would be blacklisted from participating in all MacArthur Foundation’s activities, warning that whoever is found to have committed dubious acts in the competitions would suffer the same fate.
Meanwhile, the program officer presented the sum of N30,000 to Farida Bello for being in the first position in Report a Project competition, while Idris Kongo and Humaira Suleiman received N20,000 and N10,000 for finishing in the second and third positions respectively.
Speaking after receiving the price, Mrs Bello expressed happiness for winning the competition, saying: “I am happy because I have contributed to the development of my society.”
According to Mrs Haruna, the programme is yielding fruits as two abandoned projects were completed by the government in Gaya local government area of Kano State.
