Al Mariam's Commentaries
January 29, 2023
Author’s Note: While this commentary stands on its own merits, I strongly recommend reading Part I, “Message to Ethiopian Intellectuals: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste!”
In Part II of my message to Ethiopian intellectuals, I had planned on discussing a different set of ideas and issues. I changed the subject after listening to Ethiopian Education Minister Dr. Berhanu Nega’s shocking announcements on the state of Ethiopian secondary and higher education.
Interestingly, last week PM Abiy Ahmed held a national convocation with Ethiopia’s intelligentsia (university educators and others) on their role in driving Ethiopia’s prosperity and progress. It was an animated and stimulating discussion. Many issues were discussed including educational quality, student learning outcomes, compensation for educators and the role in Ethiopia’s development.
Dr. Berhanu’s report on the Ethiopian School-Leaving Certificate Examination came on the heels of PM Abiy’s discussions.
“We have failed as a country…”
On January 27, 2023, Ethiopian Education Minster Dr. Berhanu Nega in a press conference broke the conspiracy of silence and secrecy and perennial denial and publicly dumped the truth everyone knew about education in Ethiopia but was afraid to tell or talk about.
Ethiopians owe a debt of gratitude to Minister Dr. Berhanu for exposing the raw truth about the structural failure in the Ethiopian educational system! My special thanks to Dr. Berhanu.
The statistics Minister Berhanu recited for the 2023 national “Ethiopian School-Leaving Certificate Examination” (ESLCE) are shocking to the conscience.
Video Player
Full video of Dr. Berhanu’s presentation in Amharic is available here.
Total number of students who registered to take the ESLCE:
Social Science — 620,111
Natural Science — 365,243
Total= 985,354
Students registered but did not take the exam:
Social Science — 49,259
Natural Science — 27,839
Total= 77,098
Students disqualified for academic misconduct:
Total= 1,151
Students in groups who violated testing procedures:
Total= 5,329
Students who started and abandoned exam and disqualified:
Total= 13,690
1,151+5,329+5,329= 20,170 (Excluded from the exam analysis.)
Total number of students that passed the exam:
Social Science — 6,973 (1.3%)
Natural Science – 22,936 (6.8%)
All students scoring over 50% passing and qualified for admission to university:
29,909 (3.3%)
Total number of participating schools in exam:
2,959
Schools in which at least 1 (one) student passed:
1,798
Schools in which 0 (zero/none) student passed:
1,161
Highest score recorded by a student in natural science:
666/700
Highest score recorded by a student in social science:
524/700
Dr. Berhanu lamented:
Because of the unique circumstances, students who failed the overall exam will get intensive preparatory instruction in the subjects they failed in the universities (not as a remedial program) for a year and will be given another exam. If they pass, they will be enrolled as bona fide students.
Those who failed are not only our students. We have failed as a country. The responsibility is collective and our own. Students, teachers, school administrators and the government in general must prepare to deal with a world that is starkly competitive. We have to create an educational system that is capable of meeting the challenges. That is our obligation. But this is not (the test results) something that should make us lose hope. This should be regarded as a wakeup call.
Why have we failed as a country in education?
The ESLCE “has become a headache for the federal government, the ministry of education, the majority of students, parents and Ethiopian society.”
Reflecting on the ESLCE student (lack of performance, Minister Berhanu said, “We have failed as a country in education.”
Why have we failed?
We must look to history to grasp some of the reasons.
The history of modern education in Ethiopia beginning with Emperor Menelik II has been well-documented (highly recommend to the reader).
The first formal written curriculum was published in 1947/48, and a total of seven revisions were made between 1948 and 1968… From the mid-1940s and throughout 1950s, students were expected to sit for the General School Leaving Certificate Examination of Great Britain. The practice began to decline with the successive growth of the University College at Addis Ababa in 1951. By the mid-1960s, the Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Examination had become the only valid diploma.
Education during the imperial rule of H.I.M. Haileselassie was haphazardly administered:
Between 1961 and 1971, the government expanded the public school system more than fourfold, and it declared universal primary education a long-range objective. In 1971 there were 1,300 primary and secondary schools and 13,000 teachers, and enrollment had reached 600,000. In addition, many families sent their children to schools operated by missionary groups and private agencies. But the system suffered from a shortage of qualified personnel, a lack of funds, and overcrowded facilities. Often financed with foreign aid, school construction usually proceeded faster than the training and certification of teachers. Moreover, many teachers did not stay long in the profession. Sources such as the United States Peace Corps and teachers from the National Service program (university students who taught for one year after completing their junior year) served only as stopgaps. In addition, most schools were in the major towns. Crowded and understaffed, those schools in small towns and rural areas provided a poor education.
Derg’s Destruction of the educational system in the name of socialist revolution
During the Derg era (1975-1991) education was considered a vehicle for mass indoctrination:
The education system of the Derg (Provisional Military Administration Committee) regime was influenced by several factors. These factors included the strong determination and commitment of the Derg government for expanding the communist ideology and the development of curriculum based on the philosophy of Eastern European education system. Consequently, the overall education system was aimed towards the attainment of communist ideology. This view was articulated through National Democratic Revolution in 1976, General Directives of Ethiopian Education in 1980, and the guidelines of the Working Party of Ethiopia in 1984.
The Derg weaponized education for socialist indoctrination in the form of literacy campaigns and mass mobilization to generate support for the socialist revolution.
In 1975, students (zemecha cadres) were dispatched to the rural areas by the tens of thousands under a program known as “Development Through-Cooperation- Campaign” to mobilize, politicize and galvanize the peasantry into supporting the military-led revolution. That effort backfired as students became increasingly radicalized by leftist groups which opposed the Derg.
Students began agitating against the Derg and military rule in the cities and countryside and the Campaign was cancelled. In late 1977, a new campaign of “red terror” was launched resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of mostly young people who were suspected of opposition to Derg rule.
While the Derg made significant improvements in basic literacy, overall educational quality and achievement decreased significantly principally due to lack of trained teachers and underfunding.
TPLF destruction of the educational system
When TPLF took over power in 1991, it created a shell political organization known as “Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front” (EPRDF). The TPLF ran the country with an iron fist for over a quarter of a century using the EPRDF front organization.
The TPLF ran a thugtatorship, a kleptocracy (government of thieves) and kakistocracy (government of corrupt crooks and ignoramuses) in Ethiopia.
Top-level TPLF leaders were mostly college dropouts including leader Meles Zenawi. The vast majority of TPLF political and military leaders had barely completed grade school.
Truth be told, TPLF leader Meles suffered an inferiority complex for not obtaining academic credentials from a respectable institution. He always tried to impress world leaders with his silly lexicon of catchphrases and arsenal of platitudes.
TPLF leaders got their education in the bush. They learned power came out of the barrel of a gun not the fountainhead of education. They did not have, nor did they desire, a deep understanding of education as the foundation of national development.
To add insult to injury, in 1993, as their first major act of educational reform, TPLF leaders fired 42 professors from the flagship university of the country.
The tragic TPLF educational legacy today is that Ethiopia is awash with fake degrees and diplomas mostly awarded to government officials.
On April 2, 2022, the Ethiopian Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency announced it had
spotted more than 200,000 fake degree certificates, the majority of which are offered to government officials. traced a university college which had been offering up to 15,000 fake master degrees in a year while others had given counterfeit degrees even after it was closed.
During the TPLF regime, the education sector in Ethiopia was a den of corruption.
So said a 2012 448-page World Bank study entitled, “Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia” (DCE). (See pp. 67-119 for “Corruption in the Education Sector”).
That World Bank report found Ethiopia’s education sector has become a haven and a refuge for prebendalist (where those affiliated with the ruling regime feel entitled to receive a share of the loot) party hacks and a bottomless barrel of patronage.
The Meles regime used jobs, procurement and other opportunities in the education sector to reward and sustain loyalty in its support base. The regime handed out teaching jobs to their supporters like candy and procurement opportunities to their cronies like cake. The DCE report noted, “In Ethiopia’s decentralized yet authoritarian system, considerable powers exist among senior officials at the federal, regional, and woreda levels. Of particular relevance to this study is the discretion exercised by politically appointed officials at the woreda level, directly affecting the management of teachers.”
In “mapping corruption in the education sector in Ethiopia”, the DCE report observed, “corruption in education can be multifaceted, ranging from large distortions in resource allocation and significant procurement-related fraud to smaller amounts garnered through daily opportunities for petty corruption and nontransparent financial management.”
According to the DCE report, corruption in the education sector is quadri-dimensional “affecting the selection of teachers for training, recruitment, skills upgrading, or promotion; falsification of documents to obtain qualifications, jobs, or promotions and fraud and related bribery in examinations and conflict of interest in procurement.”
The “selection of candidates for technical training colleges (TTCs)” is the fountainhead of educational corruption in Ethiopia. “Students do not generally choose to become teachers but are centrally selected from a pool of those who have failed to achieve high grades.”
The TPLF regime’s policy was to populate the teaching profession with the “dumber” students, “those who have failed to achieve high grades”. The selection of underachieving students to pursue teacher training institutes is itself infected by “bribery, favoritism and nepotism.” The most flagrant corrupt practices include “manipulation of the points system for selection of students to higher education.” The “allocation of higher percentage points for results from transcripts and national exams than for entrance exams” has “enabled a large number of inadequately qualified students to join the affected institutes, sometimes with forged transcripts. This practice has affected the quality of students gaining entry to higher education and eroded the quality of the training program.”
The DEC report noted fraud and related corrupt practices in matriculation are commonplace.
There is a significant risk of corruption in examinations…The types of fraudulent practices in examinations include forged admission cards enable students to pay other students to sit exams for them, collusion allowing both individual and group cheating in examinations, assistance from invigilators (exam monitors) and school and local officials (during exams), higher-level interference regional officials overturned the disqualification of cheaters, fraudulent overscoring of examination papers teachers are bribed by parents and students, fraudulent certification of transcripts and certificates to help students graduate.
Although there were public officials who had considered reporting corrupt practices, they have refrained from doing so because there was “a strong sense that there is no protection to guard against possible reprisals directed at those who report malpractice.” There is no place for whistle blowers in Ethiopia’s edu-corruptocracy.
Recruitment and management of teachers was a separate universe of corrupt practices under the TPLF regime.
The DEC report noted:
In Ethiopia, the overwhelming bulk of expenditure in education is taken up by salaries of teachers” and there is a “high risk of bribery, extortion, favoritism, or nepotism in selecting teachers for promotion, upgrading, or grants… Nepotism and favoritism in recruitment were broad and frequent—namely that, in some woredas, the recruitment of teachers (and other community-based workers) is based on political affiliation, including paid-up membership of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).”
What is shocking is not only the culture of corruption in education but also the culture of impunity — the belief that there are no consequences for practicing corruption.
The DEC report showed not only the
prevalence of fraud and falsification of teaching qualifications and other documents, reflecting weak controls, poor-quality documents (that are easily falsified), the widespread belief that such a practice would not be detected… For such falsification to go unnoticed, there is a related risk of the officials supporting or approving the application being implicated in the corrupt practice.”
The types of corrupt practices that occur at the management level are stunning. Managers manipulate access to
program of enhancing teacher qualifications through in-service training during holiday periods by using their positions to influence the selection of candidates. Hidden relationships are used in teacher upgrading, with officials at the zonal or woreda level taking the first option on upgradation programs.
The appointment of local education officials is not “competitive” but “politically assigned.” Collusion between local managers and teachers over noncompliance with curriculum, academic calendar, and similar practices is a relatively common practice and “reduces the provision of educational services.” This situation was made worse by “teacher absenteeism is tolerated by head teachers, within the context of staff perceiving a need to supplement their income through private tutoring or other forms of income generation.”
Poorly paid teachers supplement their incomes by “private tutoring is widespread, with 40 percent of school officials reporting it as a practice.”
Corruption also extends to “teachers paying bribes or kickbacks to management, mostly school directors, to allocate shorter work hours in schools so that they can use the freed-up time to earn fees as teachers in private schools.”
The payola is hierarchically distributed: “Bribes received are likely to be shared first with superiors, then with a political party, and then with colleagues, in that order.”
Falsification of documents including forged transcripts and certificates occurs on an “industrial” scale and is “most prevalent in the provision of certification for completing the primary or secondary school cycles” and in generating bogus “documents in support of applications for promotion.”
Procurement (official purchases of goods and services from private sources) is the low hanging fruit.
In the education sector, a number of public actors may be involved , depending on the size and type of the task. These include national and local government politicians and managers.” Some people have a lock on the procurement system. Successful “tendering companies” are likely to have “family or other connections with officials responsible for procurement.” Procurement corruption also takes the forms of “uncompetitive practices” “including the formation of a cartel, obstruction of potential new entrants to the market, or other forms of uncompetitive practices that may or may not include a conspiratorial role on the part of those responsible for procurement.
Other procurement related corruption includes “favoritism, nepotism, or bribery in the short-listing of consultants or contractors or the provision of tender information.” There are some “favored contractors and consultants” who have a “dominant market position” and are “awarded contracts for which they were not eligible to bid.” Corruption also occurs in the form of defective construction, substandard materials and overclaims of quantities.
Construction quality issues are considered a significant problem in the construction of educational facilities, particularly in the case of small, remote facilities where high standards of construction supervision can be difficult to achieve. For example, a toilet block in a school collapsed a month after completion. The contractor responsible for building the facility was not required to make the work good or repay the amount paid, nor was the contractor sanctioned. The matter was not investigated. Such
https://zehabesha.com/message-to-diaspora-ethiopian-intellectuals-save-support-ethiopian-youth-education-part-ii/
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