WASSCE Candidates Thrown Behind Bars Following Impersonation Incident

A final-year student of ICODESH School in Accra, who wrote the 2018 West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) and a former student have been sentenced to a total of 12 months' imprisonment by an Accra magistrate court for impersonation.

The student, Jeffery Okeyere, hired the services of James Kudjo, a 20-year-old gardener and game centre operator, to impersonate him and write the Integrated Science Papers 1 and 2 on his (Okeyere's) behalf for GH¢200.

Apart from the jail terms, James has been fined an amount of GH¢4,800 while Jeffery was slapped with GH¢4,200.

Jeffery has also been banned from writing any WAEC examination for three years.

The two were brought before the court charged with conspiracy to commit crime and impersonation, to which they pleaded guilty.

They were convicted by the court, presided over by Arit Nsemo, on their own pleas.

The court heard that James approached Jeffery and told him about how he was finding it difficult to write the science papers and pleaded with James to write them on his behalf.

On the day of the examination, the two convicts met at a place and Jeffery gave his uniform to James, who wore it and went to the Action Progressive Institute examination centre to write the papers.

Unfortunately for him, an examiner who was not convinced about the identity of James, decided to crosscheck the name and the accompanying image in the register and realised that he was not Jeffery.

The court heard that when confronted by the examiner, James insisted that he was Jeffery.

He and his accomplice were later arrested and in their caution statements, they reportedly admitted the offence.

Sentencing them, the judge held that they calculated their plan and thoroughly planned their action to outwit the system; and had it not been for the intelligence of the examiner, they would have gone undetected.

She said the only mitigating factor in her ruling was the young age of the perpetrators, but they must go to jail to serve as deterrent to other like-minded WASSCE candidates.

BY Gibril Abdul Razak