Mr. Ruot Mawich Yak Deng, the former representative of the South Sudanese Students' Association at Kigali Independent University (ULK) - Courtesy

Ruot Mawich Yak Deng, the former representative of the South Sudanese Students’ Association at Kigali Independent University (ULK), is sounding the alarm.

In a powerful plea to parents and sponsors, he warns that some students are abandoning their academic paths for other activities, leading to years of wasted investment and heartbreaking discovery.

“As parents, you may one day realize that your child has abandoned their studies to pursue other activities,” Deng writes.

“This can be devastating, as you will reflect on the three, four, or five years and all the resources you invested to secure your child’s future, only to find they were not focused on their education.”

This tragic scenario, Deng explains, happens yearly when parents fail to check on their children’s academic records, blindly sending money while believing they are on track to graduate. The deception, he warns, can reach astonishing levels.

As a stark example, Deng details the case of a female student from the class of 2024 who forged her graduation.

He describes a step-by-step deception that included having a custom graduation gown made by a tailor and printing a fake dissertation written by someone else.

On graduation day, her name was not on the list of graduates because she had failed her first-year finance course and had no records for her second or third year.

The lies, however, did not stop there. When her father, who had traveled from Juba to attend the ceremony, asked why her name wasn’t called, she lied, claiming it had been announced in the local language, Kinyarwanda.

A few weeks later, when asked for her certificate, she lied again, saying it would be ready in three months—despite the university’s policy of issuing them within two to three weeks.

It wasn’t until the university administration informed the father of his daughter’s true academic status that the elaborate fraud was exposed.

Deng, who is also the president of the Youth Agenda South Sudan based in Kigali, shared this story to warn parents of the tactics students can use to cover up their failures.

He is urging parents to be vigilant and verify their children’s academic progress, rather than simply funding their lives in a foreign country.

He also had a message for students, advising them to regularly check their “Management Information System account (MIS-Account)” to ensure their marks are correctly recorded and to avoid academic negligence.

Editorial Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Eye Radio. The author is Ruot Mawich Yak Deng, the former representative of the South Sudanese Students’ Association at Kigali Independent University.