WE hail President Edgar Lungu for imploring the Examinations Council of Zambia (ECZ) to ensure that aspiring candidates who produce forged Grade-12 School certificates are prosecuted for adulterating education standards.
We share the views with the president who has acutely noted that the education system should be cleansed so that people get benefits such as employment on merit.
We also feel people aspiring for public office should at least have the basic education to enable them understand how governance works.
Here we are not asking them to be professors or doctors. All we want is at least to set a minimum educational requirement for one to hold public office.
With this observation, we feel whoever implemented the Grade 12 requirement to vie for political office in the Republic of Zambia should be commended looking at the record number of politicians who don’t have this seemingly basic requirement.
We thus strongly feel these are progressive pieces of legislation and hallmarks of political excellence in our beloved country.
We say this knowing that a lot of political chaff and miscreants shall be sieved from genuine aspirants who spent some time in class learning.
Any wonder why some politicians can’t articulate issues intelligently? It is simply because a good number of them are either illiterate or semi illiterates.
And yet these people have been given heavy responsibilities to be part of governance. To get educated is an involving process of acquiring concepts and values, meaning those forging qualifications are sabotaging the country taking us back to the Stone Age in reverse gear.
The issue of Zambian politicians forging Grade 12 certificates is a serious the ECZ discovered in 2016 when it recorded numerous cases of candidates aspiring to political office being found with forged Grade 12 school certificates.
The discovery was made when the council required that aspiring candidates for the August 11 general elections must have a full grade 12 certificate inclusive of English.
The institution has reported such cases of forgery to police after identifying the owners of the documents.
The council identified numerous cases of forged certificates during the verification exercise at the service centre in Lusaka.
However, though the ECZ reported these cases to Police to make arrests, no culprit was brought to book. We are now imploring the police to take action by not only exposing the culprits, but by going further in ensuring they are prosecuted.
