Congo Brazzaville: Cheating starts at primary and secondary levels courtesy Social Media

This is perhaps the only a country in Africa, wherein when final year exams for primary and secondary  schools are ready:  head teachers from primary and secondary schools do openly offer bribes to  the  national exams board, in order to have questions in advance. They resort to such open cheating in order to a give a false illusion that their schools have excellent teachers and also that, their students are brilliant. Furthermore, in Congo besides exam leaks organized at Impremerie Ayessa, a printing press owned by Maurice Nguesso, during exams, smart phones are used to give answers to pupils and students. This is how it works: pupils and students in exam writing classes are all required to pay FCFA 50,000 each. This sum is collected by the teachers, handed over to school heads who intend hands it to head of exams at the ministries of basic and secondary educations. The latter provides answers for each subject in advance to school heads through social media platforms: Whatsapp and Facebook. And the school heads passes correct answers to students and pupils on the day of the exams. As for those who are not IT savvy, what happens is that, on the day of the exams parents contribute money come to various examination centres, pays or bribes the examiners and the police of Gendarmerie officer present, who looks the other way while parents bring in people who seat in and write for their children.  

Consequences

The standard of education in Congo has woefully dropped because of state sanctioned corruption. And as direct consequences Congolese can hardly compete with their peers within the sub region because of all the reasons earlier mentioned. When they go abroad to attend university, they hardly succeed. Their rate of success at the entrance exams for sub regional organizations such the Bank of Central African States, BEAC, has been abysmally low. Instead to seek solutions as to why their students and candidates are unable to compete with their peers within the sub region, the Congolese government mounted pressure with the support of another failure, Equatorial Guinea that, regional exams for admission into various sub regional institutions must be abandon for national independent exams. This way their candidates won’t be evaluated through regional standards, but through their corrupt national standards which encourages fraud. As a result most Congolese who get into sub regional institutions are not fit to be there. There are not fit because the national admittance system for regional organizations is fraudulently organized.

The fraud is deliberately organized and encouraged by those in power in Brazzaville because they want their relatives be admitted by all means into regional institutions of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central African States, CEMAC. This way they will be able to control everything nationally and regionally.  Having written the above doesn’t mean that, there are no bright pupils and students within the educational system in Congo. There certainly are, but these ones, most often don’t have the opportunities to excel, because they are mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds or from the greater south of the country. This part of the country even though they are the most hard working and also where are located the best minds of the country, they have less or no influence within the political system in the country. As already mentioned, the greater south of Congo lost political power courtesy the coup d’état of Marien Ngouabi. That coup d’état presented as reorientation of the existing Marxism ideology, was in fact, a way of the northerners to correct what they perceived as a historic wrong.