By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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The idea that schoolchildren sitting examinations should do so under the eye of policemen comes across as passing strange.

It is not something we are used to, that little boys and girls, already stressed by the intimidating ordeal they are supposed to undergo before they can advance to another stage of their lives, are having to exercise their minds to the fullest while uniformed agents of the state stand over them.

Yet that is what happened in Kenya last week, as students sat their exams and the state deployed thousands of policemen and women to prevent rampant cheating.

Kenya is not alone in panicking over examination leakages; all our countries have been alarmed at the rising levels of dishonesty at examination time, and have taken varying measures, many of them distasteful, to deal with the evil.

In one country we know, examinees have been removed to a school not their own just so they sit their exams in unfamiliar territory. In another, the authorities have directed the building of armoured strongrooms in school offices that have been turned into barracks, with armed police making their presence felt throughout the period of examinations.

What is all this in aid of? Why have examinations become so dangerous that our only response has to be a military one? Is it that our little citizens have become so depraved that they needed to be treated like they are a soft version of terrorists?

The answer lies at a wholly different level of our societies, in the rottenness that has curled itself around our hearts and mind.

Corruption is such an important pillar of our societies that I sometimes say that it is dangerous to talk of doing away with it completely, for that would mean the total collapse of our systems. We have become societies of cheats, shysters and conmen. And con-women.

We the adults are the ones to blame for the exam cheating blamed on our children. There are just too many parents who have amassed material wealth they can hardly explain, and who have wormed themselves into positions of so-called authority that they do not deserve, mainly through trickery, timeserving and opportunism.

Many of them have got where they are without any real qualification, so much so that they cannot see their offspring making it without extraneous props. So they get on their phones and look for examination “consultants,” that is to say those who can guide their children to pass, just to pass, never mind if they know anything at all.

Now, the “consultancy” can take the form of so-called past papers, which rather than help the student crack his/her head studying, are meant to show him/her the type of questions likely to come up based on what was asked in the past. But it could take the form of a bazaar, wherein “willing-seller-willing-buyer” do business.

This is the most popular consultancy these days. In this way, we have managed to turn our entire education systems into useless nonsense, graduating “thieves and robbers,” according to Robert Nesta Marley, my favourite prophet.

Surgical intervention

I shudder to think what your, or my, chances of coming out of a surgical intervention are when such a graduate is conducting the operation while you or I lie unconscious.

I have been asking myself about what happened to the idea that our children should be subjected to a system of continual assessment, wherein their efforts are monitored throughout the semester and the year.

Applied judiciously, this demystifies examinations and takes the sting out of them.

Of course we would be killing a market, and you should expect some people to complain and to give all manner of reasons why exams, as they are currently constructed, are the best thing that happened since Socrates did his little walks in the groves of academe.

But I have no doubt whatever in my mind that exams are a huge drag on our education, and ensure that our little people enter an examination room under a cloud of suspicion.

We already have militarised our education systems a bit too much. With long distances to travel every day to go to school, most of our children have to get up at 5am, which is a military reveille, only to get to school and meet grown people prowling around holding pieces of military equipment called canes.

Do they need more policemen?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]