By William Madouk
Deputy Minister of General Education and Instruction, Martin Tako, has revealed that top education officials received death threats following the poor performance of students in the previous year’s senior four examinations.
Tako attributed the threats to the ministry’s efforts to strengthen security measures and prevent exam paper leaks.
“So far, they have been threatening us for the last four years and nobody was wounded or harmed,” Tako said.
“The most two people are who are terribly threatened – my friend the secretary general (National Examination Council) and honourable minister, some of us have moderate threats– theirs is very serious one but God protected them,” he added.
However, Mr. Tako, said they won’t “bow down” to those threats, asserting that they will be strict to ensure transparency in exams.
“We will never surrender and dilute the examinations or allow people to buy examinations from us and put them on social media. We are going to tighten the examination more than that–we will not surrender to any threat,” he assured.
He emphasized that those threats are from anonymous callers with unregistered SIM cards making it hard to trace their identity.
“Some of these threats are just some phone to you – ‘you have destroyed this country, our children have not passed the examination we will kill you’ and then he throws whole telephone [SIM] away,” he said.
“There are a lot of crimes with this modern technology so it’s difficult for you to trace them,” the deputy minister added.
He added should anybody post on social media, the education docket would take legal action against those individuals.
“Every student who wants to pass should be very serious about studies prepare well and will pass but I have seen it several times students are not studying but passing at the end of the academic, this is why we have decided to stop it forever,” he noted.
In the previous exams, National Examination Council (SSNEC) reported a sharp decrease in passing rates for the 2023 Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) exams.
The Ministry of Education attributed the decline to stricter measures implemented to prevent exam paper leaks and curb malpractices. As a result, the passing percentage dropped to 59.9% (plain C) from 95.3% in the previous year.
Only 26,440 out of 44,131 candidates passed and qualified for university admission. Of those who passed, 16,633 were male and 9,807 were female.
Unfortunately, 17,691 candidates, including 11,264 males and 6,427 females, failed to meet the minimum university entry qualification of grade C or above.