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Kenya: KNEC Has Let Nation Down
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
EDITORIAL
24 March 2008
Posted to the web 24 March 2008
The handling of last year's Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam is a national embarrassment.
While the body has encountered exam leakages in the past and managed to pull through such scandals, the latest fiasco on the tallying of mean grades shows there is more rot in the body than the public knows.
We are still shocked that nobody has resigned over the saga and the public officers who headed the body on that period are still in office. The Minister for Education, Prof Sam Ongeri, should stop reading politics in the demands to overhaul the Kenya National Examinations Council or worse still, down playing the issue.
It is true that only 0.6 per cent of the candidates were affected but exams are not about numbers but about integrity and credibility.
When an examiner loses credibility in the eyes of the public - or is penetrated by interested parties to make dubious entries then it is time to flex the whip.
And we are not interested in token changes. No. We must look at the entire education system that has even allowed dubious colleges to offer fake exams.
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We hope that Prof Olive Mugenda's Commission will not only unearth what went wrong with the tallying of mean grades and whether corruption has found its way into the KNEC corridors but also recommend policy changes that can make our exams earn respect.
Besides the Mugenda Commission should go beyond that and look at the influence of private schools' owners on the body, the transfer of weak candidates in private schools to public schools for exams and other malfeasance practices.
In the mean time, the restoration of KNEC's integrity and credibility must be done without further delay and those found to have been behind the saga should face full force of the law. That is the only way we can restore confidence in our exams.
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