THE FQE NIGHTMARE!
…Thousands’ Dreams Turned into Dust
By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara (Kamalo)
When President Julius Maada Bio launched the Free Quality Education (FQE) initiative in August 2018—barely four months into his presidency—it was heralded as a revolutionary step for Sierra Leone. Marketed as a bold commitment to social justice, the FQE was meant to ensure that every child, regardless of background or income, would have access to free, quality learning in every government-approved school across the country.
At its core, the FQE promised much: free tuition, free admission, and free educational materials—from textbooks and notebooks to pens and pencils. The vision was clear: no child would be left behind. Especially not the poor, the rural, the marginalized.
Yet, nearly seven years on, that vision is dying in silence.
Yes, school enrollment has increased, but the system is cracking under the weight of its own promises. Behind the slogans and political speeches lies a tragic truth: the FQE is failing the very children it was meant to uplift.
Across the country, parents whisper of extortion masked as registration fees. Students struggle in overcrowded classrooms with untrained or unpaid teachers. Infrastructure is crumbling, morale is low, and quality—the very heart of the FQE—is missing in action.
But nowhere is this failure more glaring than in public examinations. In recent years, thousands of students have been barred from taking the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE)—not for cheating or truancy, but due to bureaucratic chaos, administrative negligence, and cold indifference.
Excuses abound: some students could not be “digitally located” after registration; others were victims of duplicate entries or errors in their Continuous Assessment Scores (CASS). Schools failed to upload registration data. And in a particularly cruel twist, some students were issued BRS (Basic Registration System) cards—locally dubbed “Life Cards”—only to discover their names were not on the final examination list.
In many cases, candidates whose names were listed never received their Life Cards at all. These are not isolated incidents; they are systemic failures. They are crushing the hopes of entire classrooms and entire communities.
The silence of the government is deafening. The very authorities who launched the FQE with fanfare have done little—if anything—to prevent this recurring nightmare. Year after year, the same injustices repeat themselves. Year after year, more children fall through the cracks.
Observers now warn: if this trend continues, the FQE will not be remembered as a legacy of progress—but as a grand betrayal. A betrayal of dreams. A betrayal of promises. A betrayal of the future.
For the children locked out of WASSCE, the road ahead is bleak. Many will drop out. Some will never recover. All will remember that in the age of so-called educational freedom, they were abandoned.
They are dying in silence, one missed opportunity at a time.