By: Patrick Hinga George, Public Education Officer, Anti-Corruption Commission
Sierra Leone stands on the brink of an invisible crisis, an academic time bomb ticking silently within our classrooms, ready to unleash a flood of generational corruption. While our national debates often fixate on economic recovery, infrastructure, and governance, the very foundation that underpins all progress, education, is quietly eroding. If we do not urgently address this decline, we risk producing a generation more prepared to perpetuate corruption than to fight it.
When the Free and Quality Education (FQE) policy was launched, it was celebrated as a landmark social intervention, a promise that every child, regardless of economic background, could attend school without the burden of tuition fees. The intent was noble, rooted in the belief that education is the most powerful weapon for national development. Yet, noble intentions alone cannot protect a system’s integrity. By removing the financial sacrifice once required of parents, the policy unintentionally weakened their sense of accountability for their children’s learning. For many, school attendance became routine rather than a valued investment, and quality was traded for access.
The problem is made worse by a glaring disconnect: most of those who design, fund, and oversee our education policies, elected and appointed officials, do not have their own children in public schools. Instead, they send them to elite private institutions or abroad. This creates the perception that FQE is “good enough for the poor” but not for the powerful. Imagine a Sierra Leone where every child of the President, Ministers, Members of Parliament, senior civil servants, and other public officers paid from the consolidated revenue fund was required to attend public schools and universities until at least their first degree. Overnight, education would become a true national project, teachers’ welfare would top the agenda, standards would be fiercely guarded, and quality would no longer be negotiable.
The system has also suffered from the removal of corporal punishment without any effective alternative disciplinary framework. Protecting children from abuse is vital, but discipline and respect for authority remain the backbone of a functional learning environment. In many schools, especially in the provinces, classes scheduled for 8:00 a.m. routinely start after 9:00, with pupils and teachers strolling in at will. Attempts to enforce punctuality are often met with police complaints or public confrontations by parents. The result is a culture where teachers are undermined, students are emboldened to disregard authority, and the respect that once shaped Sierra Leone’s finest minds is disappearing. Even the Anti-Corruption Commission’s “Meet the Schools Campaign,” which instils integrity values, finds itself fighting against a rising tide of indiscipline and apathy. As Chinua Achebe warned, “things fall apart because the centre cannot hold.”
The profession itself is in crisis. Once a noble calling, teaching has been reduced to a stop-gap job for the desperate. Poor salaries, deplorable working conditions, and the absence of career growth have driven away qualified educators, leaving classrooms - especially in rural areas, to untrained and underqualified volunteers. This is not just a shortage of numbers but a collapse of quality. A teacher ill-equipped for the classroom cannot inspire, challenge, or prepare the next generation. Do we truly value education, or do we only remember its importance when we complain about an underperforming workforce we failed to nurture?
Perhaps the most corrosive force of all is the normalisation of examination malpractice. Cheating is now institutionalised, with some parents actively financing it. Smartphones are purchased, not for learning, but for receiving leaked exam answers via WhatsApp during the BECE and WASSCE. Some teachers, the very people who should be moral gatekeepers, facilitate the fraud, collecting money to bribe invigilators or directly supplying answers. Even the NPSE is now tainted, producing pupils with “excellent” grades who shy away from rigorous academic disciplines because they know their results are fake.
The Anti-Corruption Act 2008 (as amended in 2019) empowers the Commission to “take all steps necessary to prevent, suppress and eradicate corruption within our governance architecture.” Under this mandate, the ACC Commissioner publicly paraded teachers caught impersonating students in examinations, a bold statement that corruption in education is as destructive as corruption in public finance. Had this measure been supported, it could have been institutionalised as a deterrent. Instead, public sympathy for the offenders, even the President’s plea for leniency sent a dangerous message: that dishonesty can be defended and accountability is negotiable. Each exam season, the ACC seizes hundreds of mobile phones from pupils, proof of well-organised cheating networks flourishing in our schools.
The fallout is visible in the workplace: nurses who cannot locate veins, lawyers who cannot interpret the law, teachers who cannot spell correctly, leaders without critical thinking skills. These are not isolated blunders, they are the logical result of a system where discipline is absent, quality is ignored, and cheating is rewarded. In such an environment, corruption does not merely survive; it thrives, embeds itself in the national psyche, and becomes the default.
Reversing this decay demands courage, vision, and uncompromising reform. Education must become a shared national responsibility, not a segregated system where the privileged keep their own children far from the institutions they govern. Discipline must be restored through rights-respecting but firm enforcement. Teachers must be valued, trained, and paid in ways that reflect their central role in nation-building. And examination malpractice must be crushed with strict enforcement, technology-based safeguards, and zero tolerance from society.
The fight against corruption does not begin in the courts - it begins in the classroom. If we fail to protect the integrity of our education system now, we will build a future where corruption is not only common but culturally accepted. Sierra Leone’s children deserve an education that rewards merit, instils discipline, and fosters integrity.
Our classrooms should be breeding grounds for principled leaders, not training camps for tomorrow’s corrupt elite. The clock on our academic time bomb is ticking. As Daniel Prelipcean warned:
"Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or long-range missiles. It only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in examinations. The collapse of education is the collapse of the nation.”
If we allow this rot to continue unchecked, no missile or bomb will be necessary — the destruction will already have been accomplished in our schoolrooms, our exam halls, and, ultimately, in the minds of our youth.
