Education Minister this morning made her first pretrial appearance in the Windhoek High Court in the case in which she is facing a charge of corruption. She is due to be prosecuted on allegations that she corruptly used her office as Hardap governor in December 2014 to place the names of two of her family members on a list of beneficiaries for the mass housing development programme at Mariental.

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education is currently under investigation for alleged corruption and financial maladministration. The Education Minister has appointed a team of forensic investigators and a multi-disciplinary task team to look into the allegations. Both the National Association of Teacher’s Union and the Congress of South African Trade Unions have brought alleged issues affecting schools.

The quality of Nigerian university graduates continues to be a source of concern with many of the country’s academics and stakeholders pointing to the prevalence of plagiarism and academic dishonesty in universities as a contributing factor. Last month a specialist in development economics was reported to have said that 70% of graduates churned out in recent times by Nigerian universities and other higher institutions of learning were “unemployable”.

A recent report by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has unearthed the rot in many of Nigeria’s higher institutions, highlighting an intricate collusion among staff, students and other stakeholders. In the report titled, ‘Stealing the future: How federal universities in Nigeria have been stripped apart by corruption’, SERAP claimed that many allegations of corruption in federal universities – such as unfair allocation of grades; contract inflation; truncation of staff’s salary on the payroll; employment of unqualified staff; examination malpractice; sexual harassment; and issuance of results for expelled student to graduate have not been thoroughly investigated.

Nigerian academics argue that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, the sole agency permitted by law to conduct entrance examinations for all tertiary institutions in the country, needs to be decentralised and modernised if it is to stand any hope of dealing with the rampant corruption being uncovered within the body. JAMB has attracted a great deal of media attention over the past few weeks as a result of public hearings into several cases of corruption, particularly relating to the sale of official scratch cards, the biometric cards issued and used by JAMB for on-line registration of all examinations candidates.

University of Zimbabwe Vice-chancellor has been arrested for allegedly awarding former first lady a doctor of philosophy degree ‘corruptly’ in 2014. Another University of Zimbabwe Professor who supervised the former first lady’s work, is also under probe. Since 2014, there have been claims that the doctorate was fake, but no action was taken while her husband was in power, up until November last year when he was forced to resign as Zimbabwean president.

Before each school year, the Ministry of Education publishes a list of approved textbooks, from which teachers will choose the ones they will use in class. For the 2017-2018 school year, the list is 30 pages long. There is big money in school books, explains a publisher who wants to remain anonymous. "Getting on the list is the Holy Grail, and no holds are barred. Imagine a little, it's a huge market, more than 5 million students! Everyone wants their share of the pie: authors, publishers, printers or distributors, even if the methods they use are not always legal.”

The Association of African Universities (AAU) has identified corruption and threats to officials of accreditation bodies as some of the issues affecting the quality of some higher education institutions across the continent. “Because of corruption, some universities that are owned by ‘the rich and famous’ as well as politicians just get opened without the minimum requirements. Some accreditation bodies also face threats if they refuse to open unbefitting institutions,”. The AAU is preparing to implement the regional recognition of higher education qualifications across Africa .