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| Onyechere |
ose are the words you could use to describe his persona and personality and no one will have any quarrel to pick with you. Fifteen years last month, he started a war on exam malpractice, a war that is still on-going.
Within those years, he had met brickwalls and has had his life threatened, several times. In fact, some fellow warriors involved in the same war with him have had their lives terminated untimely while some had been maimed for life. But he is not about to end the war or to give up without seeing some tangible results. In this interview with Education Review, Chief Onyechere, who had been rewarded with a national honour, reveals the secret behind his dogged fight, the reason he is unrelenting in his fight. Excerpts:
You started this movement in May, 1996?
Yes
What were you doing before Exam Ethics?
I was running a consultancy firm before 1996 when the Exam Ethics was launched.
What was the consultancy firm all about?
It was about education services.
As a matter of fact, I conducted a survey for the Federal Ministry of Education and one of the things we investigated was the issue of exam malpractices. In fact, during that national survey which I did in collaboration with Champion and The Guardian newspapers, we found that exam malpractice was a real problem and when I presented my reports to the then Education Minister, we agreed that it is not something that can be tackled by the regular, mainstream kind of government agency because we discovered that many government agencies involved in education were also part of the problem. Eventually, I decided that the problem was serious enough and I should do something about it. Eventually, we launched the Exam Ethics project to focus on it and deal with it.
It had been about 15 years since you started this campaign against exam malpractice…
In fact, this month made it exactly 15 years.
How has it been?
Well, it’s been very rough. It is a real thankless campaign. It’s a very difficult campaign, very frustrating because so many people are involved in it. And, even when you are talking about it and someone admits that ‘oh, it’s a problem, indeed,’ immediately you leave him, he would go and do something else. He would go and give his child money to buy question papers. Institutions, secondary schools will be charging students three times more than the normal fee they charge for WAEC exams. With that they pay the examination fees and use the rest to fund the malpractice. In tertiary institutions, there are sorting and handouts everywhere. There are all sorts of things.
People set up private schools not because they want to contribute to the growth of education but because they want to make money through exam malpractice. When you go there, you see 100 students, but when the exam comes, you see 1000 students. So, the thing is very, very endemic. In the past, exam malpractice used to be students cheating in exam, now it is an organized crime like money laundering, drug trafficking and advance feed fraud (aka 419) businesses. There are people who make their money in the exam malpractice black market.
They are there to compromise every exam and they have members in all the exam bodies that give them the question papers. They have supervisors and machineries that write the exam for pupils or candidates. If you go to special centres, they give you their product line. For instance, ‘if you want to write the exam on your own, without supervision, we take N25,000. But if you want us to hire someone who will do it for you, then we take N50,000 or N75,000. If you don’t even want to go into all that, you just want us to go and get you a result with your name and so on, we give you the price.’ That’s the kind of thing we are confronting. And, you know, the most difficult aspect of the job is, the campaign makes a lot of people very angry. These fraudsters are very strong and very rich.
They make a lot of money. They’ve blackmailed us and said all sorts of things against the campaign and against me. We had cause once to confront a man that runs a network of special centres in at least 10 states. When we investigated it, in each state, he gets an average of 1,000 students and the minimum fee, depending on the product line he was using is N25,000. If they take you to a centre where there is no supervision, that’s N25,000. That means, for that 1,000, that’s about N25 million. For the 10 centres in the 10 states, that’s about N250 million. And, that’s for just one exam out of the five major exams that you have in the year. When I tell people that it is a billion naira business, in fact, it is a N7 billion racket a year, they don’t seem to understand. People make a turnover of billions! In fact, they sponsor people into politics.
They make a lot of money. Sometimes of these tutorial centres are the fronts of the syndicates. Some parents pay N30,000, N35,000. Multiply it by the number of students that sit for JAMB or other exams every year. They are about N1.5 billion. When you see NECO or WAEC canceling the results of 100,000 students, 200,000 students every year, those are people they caught mass-cheating. Those are people who paid syndicates and went to exam halls and the supervisors turned the other eyes and they all copied themselves either in Mathematics or English. So, you find in an essay, everybody is writing the same thing. Everybody’s father is black or short. Even if NECO or WAEC eventually get to catch them or to know and cancel the results, the syndicates don’t care. They’ve made their money. It is as bad as that and we’ve had a lot of confrontation, a lot of challenges. It’s still going on. It is not easy.
Have you had a situation where your life was threatened?
Not just me but members of the Exam Ethics campaign. I’ve had members of the campaign given an acid bath. I’ve had some Reverend Fathers in Anambra whose cars were burnt. I’ve had a member in Edo State whose genitals were almost pulled off by girls in a college of education. I’ve had people with machete cuts. We’ve had lecturers and chairmen of examination committees killed. It is a very dangerous campaign and very, very expensive. Personally, I’ve gone bankrupt twice. Sometimes, by the time you know it, you don’t have money any more to pay your house rent.
So, what’s has kept you going, in spite of the inherent dangers involved?
Well, I believe that fundamentally, each and every one of us must tackle it because it affects you, whether you know it or not. If you don’t resolve what is going on in education today like the moral and ethical foundation for our youths, you cannot fight corruption. It is as simple as that. You can’t. If our schools continue to be centres where you produce potential criminals, then there will be problem in the whole polity. You can’t institute effective and efficient electoral reforms unless you first deal with educational malpractices. And, it affects you as an employer of labour. It will be very difficult for you to really get somebody who you can trust with certain things because the certificate is one thing, the actual performance quite another.
These days, you bring people to work for you, you have to be looking over your shoulder. It is as bad as that. So, each and every one of us is fighting for himself. It is not really my problem but the problem of all of us because all these graduates come from our schools. So, it should not be a concern for Ike Onyechere alone. If you support us, fine. If you don’t support us, fine. But at the end of the day, the whole thing will affect all of us like it is doing now.
Source : Sun newspaper
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