Just a few years ago, it was a great pride for teachers to be contracted by the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) as examiners or as exam administrators, and now, Not anymore!
KNEC has tainted its image and it is only itself which can redeem it. This image redemption by KNEC is quite simple; pay the contracted professionals well and immediately after work has been done.
Working for KNEC today as a contracted professional is both a big risk and a great sacrifice. Because of the serious risks involved in the exercise, most teachers would rather rest at their homes with their families than become involved.
What bothers most of the stakeholders is that KNEC keeps on churning out more and more ridiculous policies year in year out. A keen look at these policies shows how hard KNEC is trying to camouflage its glaring failures and inadequacies.
For example, it is foolhardy to say that there has never been exam leakages in the past then come up with a policy in which the Centre Managers will have to collect the examination papers from the containers twice a day, that is, in the wee hours of the morning and in the afternoons.
The question is, have the right logistics been put in place to see this policy through or is it another plan to fail as usual then hold the contracted professionals accountable? It is very wrong for KNEC to use Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to coerce teachers to administer exams. Somebody should tell us when and how KNEC became a department of TSC! For clarity purposes, Contracted Professionals isn’t the same as Contracted Teachers.
KNEC is at liberty to contract any professional to do this work for them and pay them well. It is important to note that KNEC forces teachers to work for it because it can’t attract any professional to do this work due to the poor remuneration, poor working conditions and late payments for the work done.
It took almost nine months for KNEC to pay the professionals who were contracted in the year 2022! The new policy of forcibly and exclusively recruiting secondary school teachers to administer KCSE and to supervise KCPE is totally misplaced.
Whoever came up with this policy sat in an office, somewhere in Nairobi’s South C area and imagined that Nairobi is Kenya and Kenya is Nairobi.
This person didn’t go to the field and especially in the rural set ups such as Kwale County where schools are as far apart as 30km or more. The mode of transport in such remote areas is boda boda (motorcycles).
Come think of it, a contracted professional (teacher) using Ksh. 1,000 a day on transport alone only to be paid Ksh. 400 by KNEC. This is a big joke! In a nutshell, it paradoxical these teachers are being forced to pay for the administration of national exams in Kenya.
This totally contravenes the principle of equity as provided for under Section 5 of the Kenya Employment Act, 2007 which requires that an employer shall pay his employees equal remuneration for work of equal value. An employer who contravenes this law commits a crime.
Another messy affair in which KNEC is involved in is the training of new examiners without calling them to mark the exams. Most of the teachers use their resources to train as examiners so as to build their professional capacities.
This can only be achieved by being actively engaged in the marking process. So many trained examiners have been trained in the past but have never given an opportunity to grow in the profession.
Excluding a section of the examiners from the marking process and making them a part of that waiting list to be relied up just in case the ones given an opportunity rebel against the poor working conditions and payment is just being clever; this will not solve the deep-seated problem of poor working conditions and poor and late payments.
As I intimated earlier, redeeming the image the national examination body is quite simple; pay well, pay on time and improve the working conditions!
Oronje is the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) Kwale Executive Secretary and also a member of KUPPET National Governing Council.
By Leonard Oronje
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