For the first time ever in Guinea, professors have been suspended on charges of corruption and students have been fined or jailed for cheating in exams.

Educators have stepped up controls to prevent cheating and corruption in the allocation of diplomas and university places. During exams this year the common practices of buying crib sheets, accessing tips by mobile phone or having a friend take a test did not work: Many students wrote frantic notes to the education minister on their exam papers, or simply left them blank.

In what one Guinean scholar has called the “Souaré Cyclone” - a reference to new Education Minister Ousmane Souaré - Guinea is taking aim at a system in which cheating and corruption have been seen as the only route to advancement.

“Up to now these practices have been accepted,” Souaré, minister of higher education and scientific research, told IRIN on 19 November. “It was a system of utter disarray and carelessness and this had to be stopped.”

On taking office Souaré - who hails from a teachers’ union and had worked on anti-corruption efforts in the past - said his top priority would be to fight fraud and corruption. The country has since engaged in an exceptionally open debate on the scope of the problem and how to tackle it, students and observers told IRIN.

Souaré is part of the new government of Prime Minister Lansana Kouyaté, which came to power in March after unprecedented citizen uprisings denouncing bad governance.

One of the first steps Souaré took, observers said, was to tighten up procedures during exams. Unlike in previous years, when outsiders were free to loiter about the campus, only those taking the exams, monitors and authorised officials were allowed into the testing areas, teachers in Conakry told IRIN. Mobile phones were banned for the first time.

“There is a certain level of rigour that we put in place this year,” said Aboubacar Dione, principal at Conakry’s College Donka. “We’re going to institutionalise this more and more, so eventually students will realise that it is possible to get a diploma by means other than corruption.” Dione and other school officials said they were already seeing a new seriousness on the part of students. “During the vacation, the schools were full of students taking extra courses,” he said. “You would think we were in the middle of the school year.”

Self-defeating

Corruption has been ingrained in the education system in Guinea, seen as normal and even positive, observers told IRIN.

“People would say: ‘Hey, go and see this or that school official [for a deal]; he’s really a nice guy and he’ll help you out’,” said Abdoulaye Diallo, Guinea president of the African Committee for the Fight Against Corruption Affecting Youth (CALCAJ). “They did not see the bad side of this.”

Observers said more and more Guineans are realising that corruption in education is self-defeating.

“If corruption continues at the levels we’ve seen it, with students simply paying money for grades or promotions in class, the country is just finished,” said Sékou Mouctar Touré, fourth-year student in economics and finance at Conakry’s Lansana Conté University at Sonfonia.

“This is the state making an utterly negative investment.”

The superintendent at Conakry’s Lycée Donka, Cheick Ahmed Tidiane N’diaye, said the country needs to fight a system that renders Guinean diplomas meaningless. “In the job market here, people are pleased to say: ‘I’ve hired this or that foreigner’ – a Senegalese, a Ghanaian – rather than a Guinean. We want to fight this.”

Students, teachers and analysts alike say it will take years to root out corruption but that recent changes represent a real shift.

“It will be three or four years before we see compelling results,” said Alpha Amadou Bano Barry, sociologist and vice-rector at Sonfonia, adding that the fight requires buy-in and cooperation from all levels. But, he said, Guinea has seen a “transformation in philosophy”.

Victims

The youth anti-corruption group’s Diallo, while hailing efforts to combat corruption in education, cautions that the government must have a plan for those students who have advanced in school on bribes alone.

“This worries me,” he told IRIN, saying that those who might lose their place in university or their diplomas will be left out in the cold. “We have to be careful; it’s been too abrupt and that’s a risk. Sure, it’s great to be battling corruption in education, to say we’re moving full speed ahead with that. But what about these young people? They’re Guineans too.”

He said the government must help these youths reinsert themselves into the job market.

Dione at College Donka agreed that students have been victims. “The students are innocent,” he said. “Our students can become only what we want them to become. It is up to us, the educators.”

The Education Ministry, in collaboration with the Guinean Association for Transparency, is launching a nationwide study aimed in part at identifying forms of corruption and opening a debate on the phenomenon across the country.

CALCAJ is setting up anti-corruption committees within universities and placing boxes where people can anonymously report fraud.