WAEC is to blame!

The West African Examination Council (WAEC) in Ghana lost its relevance long ago. Examination questions both in BECE and WASSCE started leaking when Adam was in pampers!

Ghanaians have been sitting unconcerned for all these years without complaining while WAEC continued its corrupt bidding, bringing the credibility of their certificate into question.

In 2002, BECE questions were cancelled due to a massive leakage, 2008 WASSCE too was cancelled and students were marked down leaving them with no option than to re-sit for NOV/DEC which is another avenue WAEC uses in taking money from desperate students who want to pass. Examination leakages or malpractices have now come to stay but some of us will not sit there for the name of our country to be dragged in the mud.

Rev. Samuel Ollenu is the Head of WAEC, he’s still at post and granting interviews from one media house to the other, showing no signs of remorse! How did the questions spread that fast, the various Supervisors or external invigilators who accompany the exam papers to the centers are all to be summoned by the BNI for thorough interrogations.

The Chairman, Rev.Samuel Ollenu and his top brass should be interdicted as investigations go on. This corruption in WAEC should be stopped now before they turn our BECE and WASSCE into a Cantata kind of thing.

We rank corrupt institutions in Ghana and forget to add WAEC who are destroying our students through examination leakages, there should be other private Examination bodies aside WAEC to oversee major examinations I the country. They are monopolizing our exam system and that give them the chance to toy with our system.

I ask again, how do we supply the questions nationwide or who watches over them when it gets to the various Districts where the exam is taking place. The Ghana Police, the Supervisor and the Regional or District Education Directors should be brought to book in these ongoing investigations by the National Security.

Before the exams, students and parents were told to pay Center fees, invigilator fees and other unauthorized fees which according to teachers will help the students write and pass very well! This is the Ghana we now leave in, where morality have been thrown to the dogs as we openly use dubious ways to get what we want. Now, every sector in this country is becoming corrupt!

Why do we have to blame our poor students? Someone gives me questions to solve or learn with the notion that, it will be in the exam proper and you expect the student not to learn those questions? A student is only guilty when found with a foreign material in the exam hall.

Candidates from hinterlands who travelled to the District capitals for the exams are to go back to their villages and come back again to rewrite all the cancelled papers! Poor parents are to struggle again for money for their wards to come and write due to the irresponsibility and negligence of a certain WAEC.

I have been of the view that, we shouldn’t be accessing our students only through written examinations but rather help them to nurture their talents. Those who get the opportunity to travel to the Western world are made to school again even after showing their WAEC results. This means that our examining body is not recognized outside Africa.

The Ministry of Education should partner with the BNI to fish out all persons who are involved in this corrupt and disgraceful act! Just as the culprits in the Police recruitment scam and the NSS corrupt deeds were fished out. I pray the defaulters at WAEC who are behind this nation wrecking acts be arrested and jailed.