THE point that needs stressing is the Zimbabwe Schools Examination Council (ZIMSEC) may have its current problems which I will talk about later, but notwithstanding, no sane mind can consider substituting it with its predecessor which was and continues to be an albatross and agent of mental slavery.
Today as we awaken from the colonial education-induced lethargy, it is high time we use our acquired re-awakening as a subversive force to turn around the structures we inherited, including those we erected, after independence to re-orient the kind of products our schools churn out and this entails transforming both the content, the methodology and the examination processes to suit our needs.
For our education to be meaningful, it must, as Mwalimu posits, ‘transmit from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the society, and to prepare the young people for their future membership of the society and their active participation in its maintenance or development’.
Our education must, above all things, teach our youth to defend their land with their blood.
Apparently our youths are full of poisoned minds from Western-drummed multimedia, understandably so because we have not configured their minds with our own software and this has led our society to stagger and falter in its progress.
Our urgent task as scholars and curriculum specialists is to delete the corrupting virus of Western education, clean our computers (our children’s minds) and re-configure them with our own software; and not with more Western literature.
In fact, I dare say those skeptics calling for the return to Cambridge are poisoned by such colonial nostalgia; a return-to-Egypt mentality.
In effect, it should suffice to comfort such cynics with the fact that ZIMSEC is an internationally-accredited examinations board.
Its syllabuses were evaluated by the National Academic Recognition and Information Centre (NARIC) in the UK and found to be equivalent to the General Certificate of Education standard offered in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, US and the other English-speaking countries in terms of rigour; hence the qualifications conferred by the Council are recognised internationally.
The purpose of this submission is, however, not to romanticise ZIMSEC; neither is it to sanitise some of the foul occurrences that are being reported about ZIMSEC nowadays.
The point is to say, as one musician put it: ‘Kana bhora rikaputika, totiza stadium here’ or better still, do we set a house on fire just because a snake has sneaked into the house?
In both cases, the answer is ‘No’.
We uproot the anomaly.
Such is the responsible reaction to any glitch; but in our attempts to cleanse our examination board, we need to admit the reality that there is indeed something wrong with the way ZIMSEC has conducted itself of late.
It is common knowledge ZIMSEC has had a number of examination paper leaks attributed to poor controls and corruption.
It is equally true this has soiled the image of the council.
It is also true that although the council has tried to exonerate itself from this debacle, the logistic matrix (transportation of papers from the council’s regional centres to schools) has shown that the council is ostensibly found wanting.
It is also true that papers have been leaked in 1996, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2012 and in 2014.
In one of these incidences of leakage, (2012), some 13 Ordinary Level examinations had to be reset at a cost of US$850 000 after a headmaster had lost the exam papers while travelling on public transport from Bulawayo to his rural school somewhere in Matabeleland.
We have to acknowledge that the exponential occurrence of such leakages is a genuine cause of panic, embarrassment and despondency.
While it is true examinations leak everywhere, including at Cambridge, by the way, owing to some such causes as computer hacking and other illicit causes, what has been happening at ZIMSEC really leaves a lot to be desired, particularly because the causes are a direct result of preventable human acts of negligence and design.
When such things happen, people have a genuine reason to fear for the security of its exam papers, as well as the credibility to its quality of its results.
It is relieving, however, to note that ZIMSEC has recently introduced seals on examination papers to curb examination leakages, which of late have discredited the local examination body.
However, educationists believe a whole range of issues need to be addressed, from low staff morale to how the exam papers are transported.
In a study titled Schools Examination Leakages: A Case of Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council, Isao Mashanyare (the Masvingo education provincial officer) and Chinhoyi University of Technology’s Emmanuel Chinamasa made an important observation: “School heads are not employed by ZIMSEC to transport and administer examinations.
“They are not paid for such services which they carry out at their expenses. “Factors that contribute to leakages include use of public transport, lack of security and a demotivated teaching force.”
In their research, they noted a number of solutions, which can help restore credibility to local examinations, among them the need for ZIMSEC to contract transport providers and/or the hiring of a security company to transport the papers.
There is a growing fear that if the leaks are not stopped, then local high school graduates might end up failing to get entry into international universities.
In a particular case, four examination papers were leaked in the Midlands province, costing ZIMSEC over US$1 million as pupils had to re-sit the examinations.
As I said at the beginning of this submission, let us admit that these irregularities are real and that the way forward is not to condone them but to see to their exit.