IN A DETAILED and alarming open letter to the Education Minister Designate, Hon. Haruna Iddrisu, one Clement Ayorigo, an Assistant Headmaster at Bassa Community SHS, has exposed the widespread rot in Ghana’s education sector.
He highlighted entrenched corruption from the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) to tertiary levels, calling for urgent reforms to salvage the nation’s crumbling educational integrity.
Mr. Ayorigo revealed that headmasters across the country are pressured to manipulate results to project a false image of success for the Nana Akufo-Addo government.
This is achieved by forcing teachers to extort money from BECE candidates to bribe invigilators. With the invigilators compromised, examination questions are smuggled out, solved by teachers, and photocopied answers are distributed to students.
These unethical practices, he lamented, create a cycle where students proceed to higher levels of education with fake grades but little actual knowledge.
At the Senior High School (SHS) level, the situation worsens under the guise of the Performance Contract system, which has been nicknamed the “Exam Malpractice Contract”. Headmasters, fearing removal if their schools perform poorly, establish “strong rooms” where selected teachers solve WASSCE questions during exams.
Students are charged exorbitant fees ranging from GH¢3,000 to GH¢10,000 for this assistance. Some schools even illegally admit “re-sitters” who did not originally attend the school, falsifying their Continuous Assessment Marks to qualify them to write exams.
These illegal admissions turn exam registration periods into what Mr. Ayorigo calls a “Cocoa Season” for headmasters. Checks by Nationaltyme.com at the one of the basic schools in Accra confirms Mr. Ayorigo’s allegations.
He further noted the adverse effects of such malpractices on Ghana’s workforce, particularly in the security services, where recruits with fraudulent grades often lack the necessary knowledge and skills.
Mr. Ayorigo also highlighted corruption at the tertiary level, where grades can be bought and female students who refuse to engage in sexual favors are unfairly penalized. He urged the Minister Designate to introduce measures to ensure that grades reflect true knowledge and to restore the global reputation of Ghana’s academic certificates.
In his letter, Mr. Ayorigo called on the new government to prioritize the fight against these entrenched practices, stating that, “Your government should not be looking for praises from people who are seeking fake grades but rather raising the quality image of our academic certificates”.
Source: Nationaltyme.com
