The mad season is here again. Yes, students in Kenya’s primary and secondary schools will be seating their examinations next month. This rite of passage facilitates their transition to high school, university and other tertiary institutions.

The tension in schools during this season is normally palpable. Teachers go hammer and tongs at revision. Students abandon all rest and sleep. The pressure to make those limited slots in the top high schools and universities is deadly.

For primary schools, the ability to deliver results that propel students to national secondary schools has been a major driver of all manner of tactics to pass exams. For secondary schools, the number of A’s attained, and leapfrogging the rest of the crowd in ranking, has been a major driver of efforts.

Given this scenario, parents, teachers and students will do almost anything to get to the top. Getting top grades in Kenya for schools has become a cut-throat business.

It is this dynamic that has spawned and driven a huge industry in exam cheating. Exam theft has become so endemic in Kenya that it now looks well nigh impossible to eliminate the vice. Every year, the Ministry of Education announces ever more stringent measures to no avail. The story at the end of the examination season remains the same – there were a lot of reported ‘irregularities’ in many parts of the country. Somehow, the exam cheats always manage to stay one step ahead of the government ‘s machinery.

It beats all logic that between the Ministry of Education and the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec), whose exclusive mandate is to manage national examinations, they have been unable to bring this nefarious practice to a halt.

A lot of work has been done over the years, but a lot of loopholes remain, and are being exploited by the exam theft cartels.

Strangely, despite the deployment of heavy security to all schools and exam centres to secure the tests, nobody ever gets caught, arraigned in court, or jailed. Why?

There is a new Education Cabinet secretary, Julius Ogamba, who is just settling down in office after getting a baptism of fire. Barely a month after he was appointed, he faced a series of debilitating strikes.

Teachers’ unions Knut and Kuppet announced that they would proceed on strike at the beginning of the third term in early September over unresolved salary issues.

Knut subsequently came to an agreement with the employer, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and called off the strike at the beginning of the term. However, Kuppet soldiered on and went on strike, and there was a chaotic start to the term in public secondary schools. TSC and Kuppet later came to an agreement that enabled the reopening of the schools.

Even as Knut and Kuppet were threatening to go on strike, workers in public universities called their own strike. Their unions, Uasu and Kusu, called a strike to push for long delayed salary increases, paralysing learning. Subsequently, the unions came to an agreement with the government that allowed them to return to work.

Well, if CS Ogamba wants the relative peace he has enjoyed in the past few weeks to continue, he needs to grab the exam ogre by the throat and ensure there are no leakages. If the story of examination theft continues in January 2025 when the results are out, he will find himself embroiled in a crisis every inch as tumultuous as the strikes he is emerging from.

The time to act is now. And he must go out there across the country and get his hands dirty. He must be ready to arrest and prosecute anybody found culpable in exam cheating. Mr CS Ogamba, for once, let there be an exam free of theft!