Fake qualifications

Oct 09, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There was once a man who lived in Guyana who used to pretend that he was a certified medical doctor from an international university. When someone decided to check on his qualifications, the university at which he said he studied was dumbfounded. Not only could they not find a record of his attendance but they were impressed by the originality of the copy of the certificate he produced. Everything matched, down to the signatures on the certificate.
This was long before emergence of electronic photocopiers and scanners. It meant that he had gotten someone to duplicate the certificate in the same fonts as was used back then before there were computers which could do this. It meant also that he had to have gotten someone to sign exactly as the authorised signatories for the university which he said he attended.
As it turned out, the only university that the man ever attended was the ‘University of Life’. He was a con man who for years was able to do what printers and scanners can do today – produce fake academic certificates.
Fake certificates are a now a billion dollar industry. Not only are persons forging academic certificates but many of them are being certified by non-existent or bogus educational institutions. Forgery of academic certificates is big business, as is the production of degrees from ‘paper’ universities.
Coloured scanners and printers now make it possible to easily forge academic certificates. Some of these forgeries are undistinguishable from the original.
Guyana has had its experience with persons producing false academic qualifications. There have been persons in Guyana who claim to have passes as CXC/CSEC which they never had. They were only discovered after persons snitched on them.
But what about those cases in which no one has snitched on anyone. There may be still persons in Guyana, who may possess fake qualifications. How does one go about exposing those persons?
It may be impossible for the largest employer in Guyana, government, to verify the academic credentials of every person in its employ. The government simply does not have the resources to do this. Many of those who work within government would have studied in foreign countries and verifying their qualifications will come at a high cost.
But there exists a moral obligation to purge the system of imposters. One way in which this can be done is for the government to establish a system of monitoring the performance of its employees and based on the quality of the work produced, there can be established some prima facie basis for deciding to verify the academic qualifications of select employees.
There are persons, for example, within the employ of the government, who claim to have x number of subjects with X number of grade ones. But yet the writing and numeracy skills of those persons are questionable. Some of them can hardly multiply;’ others cannot put together a proper sentence.
There is a problem which has to be addressed because there are many highly qualified persons in society who are unemployed and they are seeing persons less qualified than themselves obtaining jobs within the government. And these unemployed persons are becoming quite frustrated and are wondering why it is that they are not obtaining jobs.
Persons are obtaining jobs, and have been doing so on the basis of political patronage. Some of them may well have secured employment by producing fake qualifications. Some of them may have gotten their jobs by doing things which are unprintable.  Some may have gotten ahead by maliciously destroying the careers of others. Others may have no qualifications and yet are enjoying fat salaries.
There needs to be a purging of the unqualified and uncertified persons from within the government. You cannot have a professional public service with ‘pretenders and imposters’ on board. All the unqualified must be purged from the system.
They constitute part of the employment farce which is being perpetuated through fake or non-existent qualifications. They should be flushed out of the system.