This week, I received a text message from a mother whose daughter had written the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), administered by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) in Anglophone West Africa for secondary school graduation and university admission.

The message from her daughter was short, simple, and heartbreaking: “Mummy, I am disappointed. I don’t understand what happened in the WAEC exams.”

A brilliant child she had sacrificed everything for, school fees, extra classes, dawn lessons, was now in tears, confused, and broken. But she was not alone in this unfortunate drama of disappointment. It has become a national canker. That single message captures the sorrow currently sweeping across Ghana.

Almost every household is in grief. It is a national shock. If you do not have a ward who took the exam and came home crying, you certainly know someone whose ward did. Social media is awash with the chains of Fs. Mainstream media have tongues wagging. A nation sits in mourning, grieving not just over the mass failures recorded in the recent WASSCE but over the slow and painful collapse of our secondary education system.

But while parents, students, and teachers cry, policymakers and national leadership continue to play ostrich, burying their heads deep in the sand as if silence could magically erase the falling standards of education in Ghana. And so, we must ask the hard question: “Na who cause am?”
Who threw our education system under the bus?

For years, the warning signs have been glaring. Yes, I repeat that over the years, the warning signs have been glaring. We have had surveys reporting on increasingly poor literacy levels, with students unable to write simple sentences. Every year, we receive reports of widespread exam malpractices. Other challenges confronting the educational system abound. Overcrowded classrooms.

Poor teacher motivation. Under-resourced schools. Yet governments, past and present, have chosen selective blindness. They only resurface when grades look good enough for political capital and conveniently disappear when the reality becomes too embarrassing to hide.

Instead of confronting the rot, we pretend. Instead of fixing the problems, we decorate the symptoms. We once placed priority on providing students with past examination questions, but not textbooks. Yes, we did. We wanted the students to just pass the WASSCE.

But for the Northern School Scholarship, I would not have been lettered. Sadly, successive governments have turned the Free SHS policy into a political football, kicking it back and forth for votes while ignoring the structural cracks widening beneath the system.

Free SHS, though noble in vision, has suffered from poor implementation, chronic underfunding, and a lack of policy consistency. Yet in Ghana, as long as the numbers look good on paper, everyone smiles. Stakeholders close their eyes and condone cheating, leakages, and malpractice just to make the policy appear successful. We now reap what we sowed. Ask me how?

The Silent Saboteur is our secondary schools. Walk into many secondary schools today, and you will find a level of indiscipline that would shock the older generation. Students openly challenge authority. We were in a country where students could cause disturbances because invigilators would not allow them to cheat.

They dictate what teachers can or cannot do. The teacher, who once commanded respect and fear, now lives cautiously, tiptoeing around disciplinary issues that could go viral online or spark parental backlash.

Teachers are no longer allowed to punish. Teachers are no longer permitted to raise their voices.

Teachers cannot even express the challenges they face without being branded “anti-government.” The classroom has become a battlefield, and the teachers have been disarmed.

And yet, we expect these same teachers to produce excellent results. What about textbooks? Why have we abandoned the policy of the government providing textbooks to schools?

Oh, wait ooo! Which category of our students wrote the WASSCE in 2025? Is it the Green? No, it must have been gold or yellow or silver?

We now have a traffic calendar for our educational system. School attendance has become unpredictable. Students are in school today and home tomorrow, like a traffic light blinking without control.

Green: “School is open.”
Red: “Go home; no food.”
Yellow: “Wait, we’re not sure.”

And this brings us to the painful question: What about feeding? Were we not all witnesses in this country when schools shut down because there was simply no food to feed students?

When were headteachers directed not to speak to the media? When students depended on gari and sugar, or went the whole day without lunch?

I do not wish to wade into the numerous stories surrounding the National Food Buffer Stock Company, nor the scandals involving its CEO, who, overnight, is rumoured to have become a billionaire. But one thing cannot be denied: when food fails, education fails. A hungry child cannot learn. A malnourished mind cannot pass exams.

This mass failure should not surprise anyone. In fact, what should surprise us is that it took this long. For years, tertiary institutions have been complaining that students entering with supposedly excellent WASSCE grades could not defend their results. Some could barely write coherent sentences. Others struggled to construct paragraphs. Lecturers were alarmed, employers frustrated.

We have been building a hallucinated narrative of excellence, celebrating grades that did not reflect competence. Now reality has caught up with us.

This year’s performance simply mirrors what has been happening beneath the surface, an academic system that has been rotting in silence.

The Call for Reflection and Introspection. The mass failure is painful, but it is also an opportunity.

A chance to pause. A moment to reflect. A period to ask difficult questions as a nation. Are we comfortable producing graduates who cannot defend their certificates? Are we at ease watching indiscipline swallow our schools? Are we ready to confront the weaknesses in our educational system, particularly the Free SHS?

Do we want quality education or political messaging? If we fail to act now, we will continue manufacturing failures, breeding frustration, and crippling our national development. We know the solutions, yet we lack the political will to take the bull by the horns.

First, we can review the Free SHS policy holistically by implementing a targeted free education model for the most vulnerable. This will reduce strain on infrastructure, feeding, and teaching resources, and ensure sustainable funding insulated from political cycles.

Secondly, the authority of the teacher must be restored and discipline reinstated in our secondary schools. There must be clear and practical guidelines supporting teachers in managing behaviour.

We must also empower headteachers to speak openly and report challenges without fear of political interference or intimidation. Regular audits of school feeding and infrastructure are necessary, alongside performance benchmarks for school leadership.

Our school calendars must also be addressed. We need to eliminate the “traffic-light” system and establish a stable, predictable academic calendar.

Furthermore, we must tackle exam malpractice at its root. A child who genuinely passes the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) should not struggle excessively in secondary school. What we feed into the system is what comes out. We should encourage genuine learning, not the “apor” culture.

I read somewhere that the recent mass failure in the WASSCE may be linked to the current Minister of Education, Hon. Haruna Iddrisu, warning that he would not tolerate teachers engaging in examination malpractice. If this is true, the Minister deserves commendation for such a bold decision, despite the unfortunate results.

Finally, we should invest in counselling and student support. We used to have guidance and counselling coordinators in our schools who offered psychosocial and academic support to struggling students. We need to strengthen these departments to promote discipline, time management, and effective study skills.

We must rise. A nation that fails its children fails its future. The disappointment of that young girl who texted her mother is the disappointment of thousands. It is the sorrow of an entire country coming to terms with the fact that we have allowed our education system to crumble.

But sorrow is only useful when it leads to action. Ghana must rise to the challenge, reassess our priorities, and fix our education system. Our children deserve better. Our nation deserves better. And the time to act is now.