The lack of qualified teachers and government incentive to motivate locally qualified teachers explains why the system today is so rotten and plagued with all sorts of examinations scandals at the school leaving exams, ranging from leakages in school exams right up to university or college levels , illegal sales of exam papers by corrupt officials at WAEC office, leading to cancellation or withholding of students' results, thereby delaying their plans for entry into post secondary institutions. Is this not tantalizing to students?
Sierra Leone governments have never shown any genuine commitment to providing quality and affordable education -instead they came to depend on the Peace Corps Volunteers, thanks to the Late President John Kennedy
Commentary
By Anthony Karim Kamara, Snr. Winnipeg, Canada.
This above issue is the subject of this commentary and it will require answers for all Sierra Leoneans both at home and the world-wide readership from past and present Sierra Leonean administrations since independence.
When I recently read the article by Bakar Mansaray, the PV Special correspondent in Woodstock, Canada on 'Education in Sierra Leone', I felt morally compelled to add my concerns to the current state of neglect of the system which has brought shame, scandals, disrepute and even laughter to the one time 'Athens of West Africa'.
What brought the country to this low ebb is the focus of this commentary. We will need answers as to who bears the blame for this retrogressive state. It must be stressed that this country has made no visible progress in Education because all our leaders from 1961 to the present, see no need for post secondary education for the masses; they seemed to look for bare literate population who peddle second-hand text books on the streets of Freetown, Bo, Kenema and Makeni. They have so far been successful, for these text book peddlers provide a pool from which they recruit party thugs in their quadrennial elections. Second hand text books peddling began in the long reign of the APC under the late Siaka Stevens and have continued under the Tejan Kabba administration of the SLPP, and now under the re-cycled APC of President Ernest Koroma.
To understand who to blame, this piece will attempt to take readers to the end of the colonial era which ended on April 27, 1961. Prior to this date, the British colonial government left this country with only nine Government secondary schools, six of which are in the former Protectorate. These included the Bo School which was opened in 1906 initially as a primary school for the first thirty years (from 1906 to 1936), and in 1937, was upgraded to junior secondary school status and started presenting candidates for the Junior Cambridge Exams; and further upgraded three years later to full secondary school status in1940 when it began presenting candidates for the Senior Cambridge Exams.
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What this shows is that all past Sierra Leone governments have never shown any genuine commitment to providing quality and affordable education in. They instead came to depend on the Peace Corps Volunteers, thanks to the Late President John Kennedy; a large number of Indians flooded our schools, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) from the United Kingdom and Canadian Universities Students Overseas (CUSO). They know too well that erecting buildings called schools, without the right professionals to man them is as good as not building them at all. All this serves to demonstrate how every educated Sierra Leonean today has benefitted from foreign mission schools, whether Christian or Islamic and without whose efforts all of us would have suffered educational blindness because the colonial secondary schools built with colonial funds have never increased in number since the departure of the British from our shores forty-eight years ago.
The lack of qualified teachers and government incentive to motivate locally qualified teachers explains why the system today is so rotten and plagued with all sorts of examinations scandals at the school leaving exams, ranging from leakages in school exams right up to university or college levels , illegal sales of exam papers by corrupt officials at WAEC office, leading to cancellation or withholding of students' results, thereby delaying their plans for entry into post secondary institutions. Is this not tantalizing to students?
