Classroom copying, certificate forgery, shatter man’s presidential ambition
by Irvine Syazyombo

When Stevo was in Grade one at Kanyanna primary School five streams away from his village, he hated his uphill struggle of shaping letters and numbers.

When asked to write ‘9’, he would scribble a ‘p’.When asked by his teacher to write the letter ‘s’, he would write ‘2’.When asked to write ‘b’, he would write‘d’. As ‘7’, he would scribble ‘f’.

When his class was given an English test in Grade two, Stevo ended up copying his classmate’s name, Thomas, in his quest to copy answers.

In those days teachers would beat children like beasts pulling a plough in a field. Therefore for copying a name instead of writing a reasonable answer, Stevo made his teacher flare with madness.

Mr. Maambo violently lifted the ten year old boy shoulder high before hurling him onto the classroom table. The boy noisily collided with the hardwood piece of furniture.

The teacher, like someone killing a snake, violently caned Stevo across his buttocks.

After the flogging, the boy could not sit down for a week. From that time on, he made sure that he wore more than two pairs of shorts in class to mitigate caning.

When Stevo sat for Grade Seven examinations, an invigilator went round marking answers in all the candidates’ question papers thereby giving Stevo a chance to qualify to secondary school.

However when he reached Grade Nine at a secondary school, he failed completely so his parents sent him to a basic school.

After sitting for Grade Nine examinations again, Stevo managed a few bare passes but completely failed in mathematics, English, and science. Some of his school mates even went round humorously spreading rumors that he had had zeroes in those subjects.

His parents pleaded for a grade ten school place where he completed with a grade 8 in vernacular and 9f in the seven other subjects..

Wielding an emphatic line of 9f spanners on his statement of results, Stevo could not get a college place so his parents desperately bribed a tribesman college principal to enroll the young man in an accounts class.

During the three years at college, Stevo ensured that whenever he was given an assignment, someone else had to do it for him.

In some cases, he had to copy verbatim other students’ essays to avoid dropping out of college.

Unsurprisingly, Stevo failed three courses in his final year so he had to do something to avoid embarrassing his girlfriend and disappointing his parents, farmers, who had wasted their toiled for money.

Stevo made some unscrupulous individual in a shanty compound of the city forge an accounts diploma before he got employed by Lina bank. His ambition was to rise into politics and ultimately aspire for presidency.

But because of the peculiar professional errors he committed, which were highly unexpected of a ‘qualified accountant’ like Stevo, the branch manager visited the fraudster’s former college.

In the course, the scandal leaked to the press. A day later police picked up Stevo from his office ahead of detaining him.

Police charged him with forgery. The protracted legal battle ended when Stevo was sentenced to three years imprisonment with hard labour. The criminal record meant a death sentence to Stevo’s presidential ambition.

Guided by Stevo, police also arrested the individual who had been thriving on forging certificates for academic under-performers.