WAEC'S ON-LINE REGISTRATION BLUES (JULY 28, 2009)

Some of us long suspected it and it is becoming obvious that many of those who manage our national affairs know very little, if any, about our country.
Some of them, once they drive from their homes located in one of the affluent residential parts of Accra and enter their offices, come to that comfortable conclusion that Ghana is all that they have seen. At least that is what some of their decisions or policies portray.
Few of our policy makers will claim that they were born and bred in Accra, but why they easily forget certain basic facts on the ground is quiet revealing.
About two years ago, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) introduced a new registration procedure for private candidates who sit the November/December West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).
All such candidates, regardless of where they reside in the country, were to purchase scratch cards from designated points for on-line registration. Those designated points were very few and you could imagine the frustration the candidates and their parents went through to get those scratch cards at those points.
The next stage of the ordeal began when a candidate had to locate an Internet café and proceed with the on-line registration. The candidate was either frustrated by power failure, system failure, congestion or the jammed website of the WAEC. A registration exercise that should, under normal circumstances, have taken a few minutes could take hours or even several days.
That was generally the case with those privileged candidates in Accra and other big towns who could get access to the Internet, either at home or at the cafes. What about the majority of candidates for whom the Internet was still a technological magic they had heard of but had not set eyes on?
After that traumatic experience, one would have thought that any attempt by WAEC to improve the on-line registration will factor in the predicament of the majority of the candidates. The solution officials of WAEC came up with, which, in their wisdom, will make things easier for candidates, begs the question.
This time, candidates will first go on the Internet and fill electronic forms, after which they receive invoices which they take to designated banks for the payment of examination fees. The designated banks, dear reader, are the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) and the Prudential Bank.
“Until you have paid your examination fees to either of the banks, you have not registered and cannot get an index number that you have registered,” Mr Kwaku Nyamekye-Aidoo, the acting Head of Test Administration, told a Daily Graphic reporter.
After securing the index number, a candidate will now go ahead and fill declaration forms, which will be printed alongside the invoice for submission to the nearest WAEC office.
Would it not have been better improving on an old system than introducing a new one altogether which, by all indications, is going to be more cumbersome, time-consuming, frustrating and, therefore, has the potential of alienating a lot of the candidates?
Mr Nyamekye-Aidoo tried to convince the rest of us that the new system would give candidates more room for registration at the nearest Internet café, instead of in the previous situation where the scratch cards were sold at a few points.
Tell me — how many branches of the ADB and Prudential Bank do we have in the country? Tell me — which one is easier to do: To open more branches of ADB and Prudential Bank or to add more sales outlets for the scratch cards?
If WAEC had truly identified part of the problem as limited sales points for the scratch cards, what prevented it from adding more sales points, say, in all district capitals and a few of the commercial towns in the regions? Some supermarkets can also be approached to use their outlets for the purpose.
The Internet cafes, as stated earlier, are still strange to many of the candidates, not through any fault of theirs. So why should they be made to suffer for a problem they did not create? Why should they be subjected to another Herculean task of travelling long distances to locate branches of the ADB and Prudential Bank in order to pay for registration?
Did WAEC take conditions prevailing throughout the country into consideration before settling on that arrangement? Or is it that its officials just concluded that Internet cafes are common all over the country and accessible to every Ghanaian?
Even in Accra, there is a vast disparity between the number of existing Internet facilities and the number of candidates who may want to register on-line. There is the need to modernise but not at the expense of the vast majority of the population who are always consigned to the periphery when it comes to policy formulation and implementation.
I believe we can now appreciate the reason why many public servants resist posting to certain parts of the country, if patriotism means their children cannot even register for examinations.
The registration procedure may sound simple only to those at WAEC. Whatever the consideration went into that decision, it does not favour a lot of our compatriots who are in for another battle for survival.

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