Editorial: Deferred BECE Candidates and Fraud

NOWADAYS IN Ghana, many things that could be described as strange and mysterious are happening.

What is leading to these strange things is what baffles this paper, and unless drastic antidotes are found to check these strange occurrences, our future as a nation will be at stake.

For on September 1, 2006, the Daily Graphic, the national daily newspaper, carried a report that Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates had resorted to fraud to gain admission into senior secondary schools.

It is really mind-boggling to think that pupils at this early age could resort to fraud - a very strange means - to outwit authorities to enter senior secondary schools. How crude and criminal is this behaviour.

One may ask what type of youth we are grooming to be our future leaders. Here are pupils who have been given the opportunity to re-apply for admission under the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), but rather resort to cutting their names from their own result slips, place them on better-graded result slips whose sources are unknown, and photo copy them for presentation to the CSSPS Secretariat for selection and placement.

And apart from cutting off names and sticking them on a better result slips, some of these young criminals had also adopted the practice of re-writing their grades in ink, which normally should have been typed on their slips.

What type of monsters is the system creating? How could such young boys and girls engage in this type of strange behaviour? How could such people, if not detected, not enslave other students with their type of behaviour in the schools they eventually gain admission to through their fraudulent means?

These illegal acts of these deviants should not be tolerated. Those already exposed should be arrested for prosecution for fraud to serve as deterrent to others with similar evil minds.

A lot of questions need to be answered as to whether these evil boys and girls at this stage in life acquired these habits from the schools they attended and whether they were not tutored properly in civics to make them realise the dos and don'ts of society.

This paper appeals to the Secretariat of CSSPS to scrutinize properly all the re-entry application forms of candidates who deferred their courses, since more of such fraudulent tricks could be exposed and found.

The Secretariat of CSSPS should also not be sympathetic to these deviants. They should not consider the status of the parents in society of these bad nuts to shield them from prosecution. They have to be exposed now for he Police to work on their cases.

These young boys and girls are a threat to society and should be treated as such. For how could they behave if such boys and girls later found their way into our universities and tertiary institutions?

We are not to condone and connive on issues that are criminal in nature. These young criminals will be a threat to us in future and should therefore be caged for reformation.

The bureaucratic process in the civil service sometimes hinders prompt actions, which need to be taken in situations like this.

Lets have these young crooks behind bars. Period.