World-class incompetence

The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) according to its website has the vision of being a world-class examining body, adding value to the educational goals of its numerous stakeholders.

One cannot begrudge them that goal because it forms the basis on which careers of teenagers in the four old British colonies of Nigeria, Ghana (Gold Coast), Sierra-Leone and The Gambia is built.

This organisation was established in 1952 but it appears to have been left behind in the times and is becoming derelict in the purpose for which it was created.

One reads in the news that for a second time, examination questions have been leaked in a week, first for the English Language paper and now for Physics 1.

The seriousness is understated

I worry that the gravity and impact of this serious security and logistics breach has not been taken on board by the appropriate authorities.

Given that only a week ago, I wrote about the requirement for a PhD holder to submit all his certificates for vetting including that for his WAEC results, the question then becomes how much trust and confidence can be had in results that could have been tainted real or assumed leaks of questions just before the examinations.

Indeed, the education system tough, at least I know that many teachers preferred their students to regurgitate lesson notes rather than have comprehension of the subject matter such that they can tackle whatever questions are presented to them on those subjects.

Teach the syllabus for success

There is however a general syllabus that can be covered in such a way as to prepare students for these national examinations and in that way one should be able to expect them to pass and excel.

If corners have been cut in delivering the syllabus or teachers and educational organisations have not applied themselves to this service of properly educating their wards, the tendency would be to short-circuit the system and attempt to acquire and answer the questions for the examination before the examination itself.

That way, the students can excel at what they have been schooled to do throughout their secondary school life – regurgitate and pass.

Good and bad

Much as I am impressed with the internet-based developments (WAEC Direct) of being able to check results online from the year 1991 with a scratch card authentication system, less attention seems to have been paid to securing the examination questions and its transportation to examination venues.

This undermines everything else, because if the examination questions are not presented as fresh at the point of sitting for the examination, the credibility of the whole system and organisation is questionable and the consequences would be grave for all prospective entrants to tertiary institutions.

Locking vaults with strings

I cannot believe that the examination questions are just protected with a PIN, it is like protecting a bank vault with a standard issue padlock. The value of examination questions maintaining the integrity of the purpose of ascertaining the knowledge of students for onward career development is almost unquantifiable.

It is the bedrock of any nation’s future and it must be guarded with the best security tools that can be acquired from the market.

Do security planning first

It means memory-based authentication is out and secure session-based authentication with at least a two-factor authentication system is the minimum requirement. Along with this, there should be full real-time auditing for logons and any kind of access performed on all the objects contained in the examination questions repository.

Beyond this, there should be time-restricted access to the data; examination questions must never accessed before a particular date and time, the marking schemes must never be accessed before the examination is completed and any abuse of the system must exact punitive sanctions with criminal indictment.

There should be multiple question sets so that if one set of questions is compromised, the new set is triggered automatically and delivered to the responsible authorities to disseminate.

In fact, most of the issue of security, confidentiality, authentication and non-disclosure should be properly addressed in the planning stage of attempting to put any information online before any technology is deployed.

Use the old if you don’t understand the new

I am saddened that these events do not help create any confidence in the examination system and it ought not to be so.

If WAEC is not entirely ready to use the Internet responsibly in protecting its reputational brand and purpose, it should revert to the traditional system of using the armoured security vehicles to move the questions to locations and the use of bank vaults to keep the questions until when needed.

To have the lives of struggling and stressed out students mortgaged to incompetence that helps corrupt the system and compromises the foundation of their careers is unacceptable – this should be a national emergency if it is not already a national disgrace.

Anywhere else, the scalp of the organisation chief, in this case, the Head of National Office, Nigeria in the person of Dr. Iyi Uwadiae would have been taken, probably, it is time to have someone in there who really recognises the issue at hand.

To Tenerife at last

Visiting Tenerife today was a thrill, after all my fuss, it was still a day out to the zoo. The pickup to Agaete where we boarded a ferry was 10 minutes late but I must say that this trip was organised by the same company that cancelled the trip for Tuesday, late on Monday evening.

I would suppose there are empires in that organisation where one excels at incompetence whilst another department strives to make things happen – somehow booking direct and booking through a hotel tour representative can make a whole lot of difference, I still never found out why the tour was cancelled.

At a bearing from 310 degrees we set sail for Santa Cruz de Tenerife and it was all over in just about 70 minutes.

Loro Parque

On disembarking we boarded a bus and headed for Loro Parque on the western side of Tenerife, it was established in 1972 as a parrot aviary but has grown to include a larger variety of animals and it is the home all sorts of endangered or threatened species.

There is such a fascination for watching sea lions and dolphins perform, but we also had the added fun of watching orca whales. When we arrived in the Orca Ocean arena, the cameras zoomed in on me which was beamed out to the big screen with a balloon callout 'bald is beautiful' – I could only wag a finger at the prankster.

Hard entertainment

Sometimes, I wonder what it takes to entertain us. When we watched the Diana Ross tribute performance, each completed song drew polite applause.

A few days later we watched a Chinese acrobatic troupe and as each performance got a bit more difficult we seemed to be less appreciative of the last and were slow to applaud the next.

Imagine, the man was balancing on one end of plank which was placed on top of the round side of a cylinder and was using the principle of levers to flip bowls from the other end of the plank to the top of his head. He did it with three bowls at a time and then a cup and finally flipped a spoon into the cup.

Another performance was the legs of a chair each balanced on 4 beer bottles and the man doing handstands on the back and seat of the chair, he went on to balance another chair unevenly on the first chair and still do handstands but each consequent applause was grudging, I probably initiated the most appreciation for those acts.

A lady spinning tables with her feet on the table edges and obliquely, then going on to spin a colleague on a barrel, really awe-inspiring stuff as far as I was concerned.

Fascinated more by animals

So watching sea lions, then dolphins and finally orca whales do the same acts of jumping out of the water, going through hoops and splashing around, whilst being incentivised through frequent handouts of fish was in no way boring as if humans were to do the same thing, each repeated act still drew increasing applause.

Animals do repetitive things compared to humans doing unique things and we felt better entertained by the animals.

By the time I returned to the hotel, there was great consideration on their part of offer a cold buffet, but as the saying in Yoruba goes, the late night visitor would hardly have choices for the food laid before him – a salad and a bottle of cold water, you could not complain at all.

Burnt child

First in Austria, one cannot begin to imagine that Josef Fritzl probably conducted a few abortions on his daughter before he decided the products of their incestuous liaisons should come to term as children.

It is sickening that on the death of one of the children, rather than dignify the child with either a proper burial or a cremation, he dumped the child in an incinerator and that was the end of the matter.

Stabbed children

And so in Scotland we read of the discovery of two dead boys in a car near a beauty spot just north of Glasgow. It transpired that the boys aged 2 and 6 were stabbed, apparently by their father estranged from their mother and seemingly had not been successful in killing himself.

It really beggars belief that a relationship which at one time was the joy of all involved that it lead to the birth of those beautiful people could have soured so much as to damage all involved to this extent.

A lot must be to blame for this event, the father, the mother and their inability to keep the relationship going for whatever reasons and the system that accords rights of custody and visitation with scant regard for the emotional strain it can place on parties involved.

The children who were supposed to be at the centre of the matter of care and concern who supposedly would have received the best result of a separation have now become the unfortunate victims of a situation I naively cannot properly understand.

Frozen babies

Then in Germany, a teenage son goes down into the cellar to see if he can find a pizza in the freezer and ends up finding 3 bodies of babies in the freezer that could date back 20 years.

You begin to wonder if those were his brothers and why he decided a pizza would be in that freezer of all the other freezers that might have been on that house from which he might have retrieved a pizza before. The tale reveals all.

His mother seems to be the culprit, this is all looking insane.

Neglected children

Portugal must have had its share of being the place not to take your children on holiday after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann just over a year ago.

But I could not believe my ears when I read that a couple – parents with young children age 1, 2 and 6 – had drunk themselves to a holiday stupor that they collapsed with the result of their children being put into care for a night.

If we have to save the children from their parents, what safety do children have in this world? I do wonder.

Motion-induced sleep

A crashing sound, a sudden jolt and I was woken up from slumber just like I was 27 years ago.

I am of the opinion that certain people never grow out of the sensation caused by rocking a child to sleep in a pram, put me in any moving vehicle and I would the king of the Land of Nod in minutes.

It was a weakness my father could not tolerate, a whack in the car and complaints that I am always falling asleep – no one considers that motion might be triggering a soporific effect – sometimes our parents never can try to understand why their children could be different.

The problem with this situation is that I have never been an eye witness to any accident in which I have been involved; I was always jolted awake to witness the effect.

The boss’ kid is a dunce

That day, I had been driven up to Agbara at the brewery for an interview as a laboratory assistant, well, it was not so much an interview, I already had the job, I was the son of the Chief Accountant, but all righteousness had to be fulfilled.

The joke was either going to be the son of the big boss was a dunce or the young boy is quite smart.

After answering questions like defining Boyle’s Law and Charles’ Law, saying a few things about pH and titration, I was introduced to the staff and asked to report for work on Monday.

Whack and bang

As we were returning home the driver ran into the back of a tow truck that was laden with a damaged car and our car was written off. It was our driver’s word against the other with the supposed witness as useless as not being there.

On returning from Las Palmas today, we went into the bus stop which has parking lots that the bus drives into and then has to reverse out before driving off.

I was already halfway into the Land of Nod when as the bus was reversing it ran into the side of another passing bus and broke two panes of glass showering some passengers with debris.

Thankfully, glass in vehicles disintegrate with some controlled order or respect, if that is the word to use; they were moved out of the bus to another, our driver had to file a report and soon we were on our way back to Playa del Inglés where I can say, I arrived safely and managed to keep awake through the whole journey – only just.

Hard graft planning

It has been drama, disappointment and delight trying to arrange a trip to Tenerife, only determination and the exquisite service of the staff at the Riu Palace Maspalomas saved the day.

On Thursday, I tried to arrange a trip through LastMinute excursions and there was no one at the other end of the phone to sort it out.

I then went to a tour arranger on Friday who struggled to make the arrangement only to find out that I could not travel on the days I wanted and had to wait a week.

When we finally got to the detail, they would not pick me up at my hotel and the pick-up time was set for 05:31 in the morning despite the fact that their brochure indicated 07:31 – I eventually gave up on that arrangement.

A basic trip round the island was also too difficult for them to setup; it made one wonder what business they were in.

Arranged but cancelled

So, I returned to my hotel reception where there concierge was able to setup the VIP Tour of the island for Saturday and the trip to Tenerife/Loro Parque for Tuesday – today.

I dropped my keys at reception on Monday well after 15:00, but when I returned, there was a note for me indicating the trip had been cancelled.

I was not impressed and this was supposed have been arranged by another outfit called Ultramar Express – we were go nowhere either slowly or by express by all accounts.

No one could tell why the trip had been cancelled, that is not to say that it was also going to be an early pick-up at 05:35 in front of my hotel.

In the face of all that, I would have been able to have an early breakfast and a late cold dinner when we returned, but it did not happen and so my story.

They offered a simple Loro Parque tour for Wednesday which would have been just as good as a day out to the zoo, I wanted more, so I cancelled.

Service I cannot only praise

The manager however agonised about how to help, at one time I had the idea of going for a night to Tenerife and I went to see a travel agent recommended by the hotel – the travel agent was busy fixing a new air-conditioner so could not do anything till the afternoon.

As I returned to the hotel, the manager had already spoken to a tour director to see if I could join one of their arrangements to Tenerife that includes the Loro Parque, in fact, all had been arranged and it only required my assent.

He had the cash and all the necessary stuff ready when he came to speak to me and offered to introduce me to the tour director in my own time. I immediately took up the offer and it was all done in less than 5 minutes.

New pickup time – 07:20 on Wednesday and the guarantee of a late dinner when we return at just before 22:00.

Staff this good

You cannot get staff this good in any place but where they are well paid, well catered for and recognised as assets to the company – there is no doubt that it is the staff that creates the opportunity for repeat visits to these luxurious establishments.

I am utterly delighted and pleased; I do not expect to hear the tour has been cancelled but then, let us not tempt fate.