Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) officials drawn from Samburu County urged the national government to provide security to both teachers and students during the national examination period to ensure that recurring banditry attacks on examiners during this period do not reoccur.
Speaking on Monday, KNUT National Chairperson Patrick Karinga called upon the government to put in place measures to ensure both teachers and students felt secure during this period as the exercise kicks off on Tuesday.
“We are going for supervision of exams from next week and they are very much concerned with their security. What we are saying is we are calling on the government to give our teachers enough security during the time of writing this exercise which is so critical to our school-going children,” Karinga stated, further calling on the government to address the late payment issue as well.
The secretary general for KNUT in Samburu County Richard Lentaya also noted concerns about how such attacks affect the smooth execution of the national exams for students and teachers in such banditry-prone areas.
Samburu East MP Jackson Lekumontare also asked the national government to provide solutions to issues like flooding which slow the delivery of examination materials to some students. With a few expected to not be passable due to floods, he asked the national government to provide better transport like the use of high-endurance vehicles to traverse the terrain or even helicopters like the previous year.
Lentaya also echoed these sentiments saying, “We want them to get very powerful vehicles that can make sure that these exams can reach the students wherever they are. Even if the roads are looking impassable, let them have helicopters. They do the same way they normally do with elections.”
Elsewhere in Busia County, the County Commissioner Mwachaunga Chaunga on Monday warned examiners against facilitating cheating during the upcoming KCSE and KPSEA national assessment examinations.
Chaunga warned the invigilators of the new anti-cheating examination material that would detect if a picture had been captured and report the perpetrator to the headquarters in Nairobi saying,“The exam material we have now, if you take a picture it will report you. It will report you to Nairobi with details on what time the picture was taken and where it happened.”
“I am urging teachers to please distance themselves from such practices. We have said several times that phones should not be brought into exam halls. If you are a teacher who will try to take pictures of those examinations, woe unto you. We will not entertain you because we cannot allow people to break the law,” he added.
With the exams slated to start on Tuesday, the Busia County Education Director James Ekalio also echoed the sentiments urging the examiners to maintain integrity during the examination process.
“We have received reports that there are people who want to corrupt our students, telling them that they have leakage and Mwakenyas for them. We are alert as the Ministry of Education and we are working with the ministries of ICT and Interior to ensure that every student takes their exams without coercion to cheating,” Ekalio stated, further promising legal consequences to any examiners involved in the cheating.
The national exams are slated to kick off this week with KCSE starting on Tuesday and KPSEA on October 28.
