The Cabinet Secretary for Education Julius Ogamba has asked the Judiciary to deal swiftly with cases involving suspects arrested over malpractices in the ongoing Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE).
Mr Ogamba made the request following the arrest of a number of people in different parts of the country, the latest being the arrest in Nyamira County on Sunday of Stephen Nyang'au Mbeche, who the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) suspects is the administrator of a group on Telegram purporting to sell examination materials.
Several groups have been set up on various social media platforms to lure gullible parents, learners and teachers. The individuals fraudulently fleece their victims on the pretense of giving them the KCSE examination papers in advance using online platforms.
"We have asked the Judiciary to help us ensure that prosecution is swift so that people face the music. So far, the investigation and prosecution take too long and people forget that it happened and they keep repeating [the offence]," Mr Ogamba said.
He spoke when he oversaw the distribution of examination papers in Langata Sub-county in Nairobi on November 11 2024.
The CS also said the Ministry of Education would consider closing down private examination centres that will engage in examination malpractices.
“In the event that those private centres are found open to manipulation or malpractice, we will recommend that they be closed going forward because there is no point in having a small group of people giving a bad name to the whole examination,” Mr Ogamba noted.
“You are working very hard. You wake up very early. You are struggling there and then one or two individuals who have commercialised this exercise give it a bad name,” Mr Ogamba said.
“We want to have a clean sector for posterity and I ask you to follow the guidelines provided,” the CS added.
The suspected fraudster has been operating a group on Telegram called “KCSE 2024 Leakage Group”. Detectives attached to the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec), arrested Mr Mbeche within the Masaba North area in Nyamira County.
They seized a laptop, a mobile phone and other items which they believed he had been using to lure parents and students involved in the cheating.
“The suspect is being processed for prosecution and the team continues to track down other individuals involved in similar malpractices,” a police statement reads.
Mr Ogamba said he would support examination officials in delivering credible examinations but warned that he would disown anyone caught engaging in any form of examination malpractice.
He said the Ministry of Education will not cancel the results of other candidates at an examination centre just because an individual has been found engaging in an irregularity in a particular centre. He said doing so would be unjust to those who adhere to the stipulated manner of doing examinations.
“This year, if there is any malpractice, we are not going to condemn the whole school, the whole centre, the whole number of people who are there but it is going to be individualised unless the cheating was coordinated,” Mr Ogamba said.
In Machakos County, the CEO of Knec Dr David Njeng’ere played down fears of cheating in the ongoing examinations, saying there was no cause for alarm.
“As we have witnessed, one of the major reforms that we introduced last year to take care of the challenge of early exposure to examination materials is that schools collect only the morning session paper, they administer and bring back the candidates’ answer scripts and take the afternoon session paper. That has helped to completely cure the challenge of early exposure to any of the question papers. We are just walking around to monitor that all the other innovations which we introduced this year, especially the issue of mobile phones, are followed to the letter,” Dr Njeng’ere when he toured the region to oversee the collection of Mathematics Paper 2 examination question papers by school principals.
“As soon as the question papers enter any exam centre, all phones are supposed to be surrendered to the supervisor and should be secured in a lockable space. That is what we are enforcing. We have 99.99 per cent compliance but we have a few cases where we still have a few people who are not following and those are the cases that are making us come out here to make sure that they are followed to the latter,” Dr Njeng’ere added.
He said the onset of the short rains in some parts of the country will not affect the distribution and administration of the KCSE examinations.
“So far, we do not have cases of rainfall interrupting the distribution and administration of the examination because in the very remote areas of the country, we have helicopters which are able to drop the test papers and for all the other areas the rains are not too heavy; we are able to deal with it,” he said.
The investigation established that the fraudsters were selling the papers between Sh2,500 and Sh18,00 depending on how many papers one needed.
