Malawi blames S/African printer for massive exam leakage

Blantyre, Malawi - Malawian education authorities Monday blamed a South African printer for “security laxity”, which resulted in the nullification of results of examinations written by 80,000 students after it was discovered that copies of the papers were leaked and sold before hand to thousands of pupils.

“Security laxity compromised the entire printing process,” deputy Education Minister Olive Masanza, said in a statement.

Masanza said this led to one Malawian driver, one of the four sent to collect the papers in four trucks from South Africa, to “illegally obtain some papers which were sold to some schools in the country.

Embarrassed by the scam, President Bingu wa Mutharika, last year launched an inquiry into the leakage.

The students later wrote fresh senior secondary school certificate examinations, the equivalent of O-Levels, to avoid candidates who were exposed to leaked examination papers to have an unfair advantage over their colleagues, who wrote the same examination without any assistance.

Officials at the Malawi National Examinations Board (MANEB), which administers examinations, had previously vehemently denied that copies of the question papers were leaked.

However, dozens of people were arrested while selling the exam papers, and the driver, who was identified as Mcnight Kaliza, was prosecuted and jailed for over two years.

In 2000, similar examinations were cancelled when some papers were leaked and sold on the streets, prompting former President Bakili Muluzi to fire MANEB's chief executive Meria Nowa-Phiri.