DUMISANE LUBISI, Middelburg | Tuesday 1.00pm.
POLICE investigating the Mpumalanga matric scandal have already questioned 40 of the 120 officials involved in marking the 480000 final exam papers last year.
Pretoria police spokesperson, Captain Jennifer Chetty, said on Monday that the investigating team had taken 40 statements and was continuing with the investigation.
“We’re still waiting for forensic results on 2500 of the examination scripts to see if the handwriting on them match,” she explained.
She said the investigation should be completed within the next few weeks and that the report would be sent to the Attorney General who will decide whether to prosecute.
The provincial education is conducting its own internal investigation to determine which officials tampered with the results, inflating the marks to 72,6% last year.
It is believed that some officials personally rewrote papers to inflate the marks.
An investigation by Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann found that the actual pass mark was 52,5%.
Both teachers and students unions in the province have called for the urgent resignation of departmental head, Faith Sithole, and examination director, Gogo Ndlovana.
The South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) and Congress of South African Students (Cosas) said Sithole and Ndlovana should resign since it was impossible for them not to have been aware of the tampering.
Cosas has threatened to bring the province to a standstill by holding strikes and marches unless matriculants whose marks were inflated are allowed to keep those marks.
The department has urged matriculants who failed after their papers were remarked to register at their different schools so that they can rewrite their papers in November.
The deadline for the registration is May 31. – African Eye News Service