Features
Leakages and academic dysentery
Student life just prior to GCE exams is as interesting and adventurous as it is tragic. It is a period during which recalcitrant finalists are tempted to break into backyard poultry outfits of senior house-masters, so that they can enjoy chicken-soup while “ghosting.”
And in mixed schools, it is during this revision period that boys and girls alternate studies with romance in such a way that at the beginning of the long vacation, the girls can clandestinely approach unscrupulous doctors to scoop out growing babies from their bellies.
A few weeks to the beginning of the first paper, many students develop physical and imaginary illnesses ranging from amnesia to kpokpomatics (nervousness). The budding finalist who is serious and level-headed plans his study time-table and allots time for bath, meals, siesta and snoring.
Such candidates follow their own regimented programme to the letter and enjoy normal life while studying for their exams. They are health-conscious, do not take drugs and they enjoy rest to avoid brain fag.
There are other serious students, however, who are not concerned about health. They are so busy, or claim to be, that they refuse to take their bath, comb their hair, wash their hands before eating and sometimes, simply refuse to go to “toilet”. This is quite revolutionary and I wonder how they manage it. But that is not all.
They take ‘caterpillar’ to keep awake, fail to wash their cover-cloths, and have air conditioners permanently installed in their armpits. These are students who are on the war-path towards academic distinction but ironically very few of them do well.
Some are so over-zealous that they pack and carry books for all their eight or so subjects to the classroom swearing to ‘chew’ all before day-break. They end up learning virtually nothing because they prefer the rhythmic snoring using their books as pillow to cramming Abbot.
The following morning, they will be the first to impress their colleagues: “I swear my father’s moustache that last night I did what Napoleon could not do.” For sure, Napoleon did not sleep that much. Ninety per cent of such students end up in the academic grave with grade 9s, subsidiary passes and FAIL as their lot.
Incidentally, however, those category of students are more acceptable to organised society than the happy-go-lucky ones who regard academic excellence as sacrilegious and, therefore, include discoing, wee-smoking, chasing form-two girls and stealing gari from frail chop boxes in their study programme.
These are the students who are so intellectually deviant that they keep on praying papers should leak so that they can prove to their ‘book-long’ fellows they are a force to reckon with.
A month to exams they go hovering about West African Examinations Council (WAEC), forcing tete-a-tete with crooked officials some of whose faces look hungry enough to accept money in exchange for exam papers.
Others trot from school to school contacting friends of similar feather to obtain information about possible leakage points. The girls become unusually liberal to the Assistant Headmaster who may, as a reciprocal gesture, be tempted to ‘peep’ two or three Maths questions from one paper to offer as sure tips after carefully changing the wording. These assistant heads, therefore, become alphabetical surgeons; a very infamous occupation.
In the 70s, the incidence of leakages and exam malpractices became so rampant among the WAEC countries that Nigeria swore to rid its territory of the epidemic.
They did succeed. Sikaman authorities also swore same, and for some time, ears became free from news about leakages, impostors and ‘copiato’ (copying during exams).
But just as we had begun the last decade of the 20th Century, the plague re-surfaced and today some students and their allies are under lock and key for the part they played in this scholastic uprising.
Papers leak right from WAEC strong rooms, police stations and assistant headmasters’ vaults.
When papers for instance go into transit at the police station for onward transmission to the exam centres, surgical operations are performed on the sacks and the papers extracted and put on sale on the open market.
Sometime ago, the situation degenerated so much that Makola women were seen hawking. Additional Mathematics papers just like tomatoes and garden-eggs.
One interesting but unfortunate thing about leakages is that it does no one ultimate good. To a brilliant student, a leaked paper in his possession makes him unable to justify his intellectual capacity and his scholastic worth is over-shadowed.
To the brainless, it is simply a disaster. He has no brains whatsoever to imbibe solution to the answers. He has to choose the alternative of entering the exam room with copied answers. And there, he becomes a copy-writer and proof-reader. Speed is his best asset, but he is most likely to be caught.
One block-headed student who acquired a leaked paper was faced with the problem of choosing between ‘chewing’ the answers (which was virtually impossible in view of his deficient IQ), and turning himself into a speed copy-writer. He however decided to do neither of these.
In the exam room he considered his plight. All his friends and enemies were also in possession of the paper and had prepared so well that they were going to clock beautiful grades. And he, the only JUDAS in the lot will surely wind up with a grade 9. What!! God forbid!
On the answer sheet he wrote a very brilliant letter to the examiner in clear hand-writing and similar to this:
“Dear Sir, this very paper you are marking is under massive leakage, and I know that people are going to blow it paa-a! But as for me, although I also had all the questions, I am as daft as a live sheep. My father had no brains in his big head. As for my mother, the least said about her, the better. And as you know that a dog does not beget a cat, I was born an idiot.”
“So when I got the questions, I didn’t know what to do with them. Will you please therefore consider me and pass me too. Otherwise, I alone will die of academic dysentery. Thanks for your usual cooperation. Yours faithfully…”
The paper was cancelled, and students had to suffer the expense of re-registration and frustration, not forgetting the loss of time.
The only solution to this grave problem of exam leakages and allied criminal offences is that the law must prescribe stiffer punishments for those who perpetrate and or collaborate to further these criminal practices.
Those convicted of these offences must be packed away for as long as would be possible to make them forget about exam papers. Such a deterrent measure would help minimize the problem. Proper security arrangements must be organized by authorities of WAEC to rid Sikaman of this recurrent menace.
We must all endeavour to prevent the situation where outsiders will feel inclined to refuse recognising our dear certificates which many have toiled for, but which a dangerous few want to obtain without sweat.
This article was first published on Saturday, June 30, 1990.
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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