Government under fire over ‘standardised’ exam results

“Infact, politicians are not education experts, so the National Examinations Council of Tanzania should be left untouched to perform its duties” EZEKIEL OLUOCH, TANZANIA TEACHERS UNION SECRETARY-GENERAL 

By The Citizen Reporters 

In Summary

• He added that reactive measures taken by the government in standardising the results were not expected to bring any miracles, mantaining that the problem would remain unsolved unless the education system is completely overhauled.

Dar es Salaam. The new Form Four examination results released in Dar es Salaam yesterday have drawn mixed reactions from education stakeholders, with some terming the move by the government to nullify the previous results as “a whitewash”.

Interviewed by The Citizen, they said that the new results would not help students who were desperately affected after the announcement of the earlier results.

Senior lecturer with the University of Dar es Salaam, Dr Kitila Mkumbo, said that Tanzania should expect massive failures in the future because the government had not solved the issue properly.

He added that reactive measures taken by the government in standardising the results were not expected to bring any miracles, mantaining that the problem would remain unsolved unless the education system is completely overhauled.

Dr Mkumbo said public schools in the country lacked learning facilities, stressing that schools need adequate teachers, learning facilities, and high teachers’ morale. 

For his part, the headmaster of Loyola High School in Dar es Salaam, Fr Binamunga Makosa, said that there were no significant changes in the new results.

He added that the number of students who scored Division Zero was still big and that the nation’s education sector was still at a crossroads.

The secretary general of the Tanzania Teachers Union (TTU), Mr Ezekiah Oluoch, said that the earlier results were real on what candidates had scored, while those which were announced yesterday’s were politically driven.

“Infact, politicians are not education experts, so the National Examinations Council of Tanzania should be left untouched to perform its duties,” he said.

He said standardisation neither helped the students nor the country’s education sector. As a result, according to him, the country will continue producing a generation of students thinking from an agora of abject illiteracy.

“Standardisation doesn’t help...it generates poorly uneducated Tanzanians. This shows that the education sector has political influence because the results show that children learn nothing while at school, but politicians want to change the truth,” he claimed.

He added that even the increase in performance had changed nothing because half of the candidates had failed.

 Masozi Nyirenda, senior fund allocation officer at the Tanzania Education Authority (TEA) said that there was laxity in the government and that the new results would not add any value.

“The government painted a weird image by failing to solve the results’ malpractices internally. What we see now is politics and it is hard to believe if the results were not doctored to meet people’s expectations,’’ he said.

Reported by Katare Mbashiru, Elisha Magolanga and Fariji Msonsa