Inside the world of online writing and why Kenyan youth are increasingly getting drawn to it

Late last year, the BBC published an article daringly titled ‘The Kenyans who are helping the world to cheat.' The piece, compiled by BBC investigative journalists Reha Kansara and Ed Main, explored the dark world of ‘Academic Writing,’ a dubious, backstreet 'profession' preferred by Kenyan university graduates and students.

After the macabre deaths of the infamous ‘Kasarani Four,’ it was quickly revealed that Frank Obegi and his cohorts were renowned in the world of academic writing and had, allegedly, swindled their victims with the promise of quick bucks begotten from the online writing trade.

This same trade, many of their friends said, had made the young campus boys stupendously rich and fortunate for kids in their early 20s.

What many Kenyans call ‘Academic Writing’ is actually, according to the BBC probe, outright cheating.

In Kenya, academic writing has become such a huge source of quick profit that the purveyors of the illicit trade have created an entire subculture around it - even brazenly advertising their 'services' on platforms like Telegram, Twitter and Facebook.

Academic writing, to be very blunt, is basically the art of picking up 'exams' meant to be done by foreign students and doing them yourself. For a fee.

Students from leading campuses across the world, from the US to the UK and beyond, are the greatest beneficiaries of this trade as they send volumes of essays to Kenya in exchange for a tidy amount of dollars.

"We are jobless. We have graduated but still are unemployed. That's where academic writing comes in," Martin Njagi* (not his real name) says.

In an exclusive interview with Citizen Digital, Martin claimed that he can churn out as many as 300 essays or online exams a month and make quite a decent pay from the unscrupulousness.

But what exactly is online writing?

"Well, it's as simple as this - you log in for a student and sit an exam on their behalf. There are many reasons why the student is not doing the exam including the fact that he may not have studied for it, or is simply too rich to bother sitting down for hours and hours, going through papers. That's where we come in. Unlike American or British students, who have all the money in the world and little time for studies, we are broke, we have time on our hands and we have bills to pay," Martin says, matter-of-factly.

A good month in the field of academic writing can fetch an experienced writer as much as Ksh.150, 000 ($1300) and at least Ksh.3,750 a day.

Martin says that the trade can be tedious and that it demands a lot of dedication, concentration and sacrifice.

"Making that kind of money is not easy. A lot of lesser experienced writers, who lack dedication and discipline, make very little per month. To attain those figures, you've got to work yourself out. I work full-time, all day and all night. Because, also, the pay depends on the volume of material you put out," he says.

But before you become a writer or scale up the ladders of this trade, there's a little something called an 'account' which is basically the pathway to glory in this lucrative trade.

Accounts are widely sold across the internet and can be very costly - some are flatly impossible to acquire.

"You can pay as much as Ksh.500,000 (around $4200 ) for a single account and as little as Ksh.100,000  ($850) for an account that is not very highly-rated in the academic world," Martin divulges.

Accounts with lots of five-star customer reviews are valuable commodities and are bought and sold in academic writing groups with earnest and much bidding.

From the US or the UK, students get to browse through the accounts with the most stars and submit their work hoping that it will be done by a glowing writer only for it to end up in the hands of a monied, basic writer at Kahawa Wendani in Kiambu County.

Given the staggeringly high prices, it basically means that not everyone can afford the luxury of having an account and therefore, a lot of businessmen buy these accounts in bulk and then hire ambitious writers who they basically sub-contract as they sit pretty in their lush mansions in the leafier sides of town.

These accounts are basically like any other typical social media account - it has a profile picture (in most cases of a white person) has a section where a writer can describe themselves (often glowingly), has a review section and also a 'star' section where people can actually help in boosting the accounts credibility by giving it a thumbs-up.

"Look at it more like a Google App. Apps with more downloads, reviews, stars, comments, etc, get the most downloads, recommendations, etc," says Martin.

A 2018 study conducted by the Swansea University revealed that out of 50,000 students, 15.7% admitted to cheating in exams and paying someone to write their campus assignments.

Companies that offer these services are called 'essay mills' and while they are legal across the UK, these businesses are banned in the US and in countries like New Zealand.

People like Martin Njagi have specialized in all fields of work and are excellent at doing a perfect dissertation for a student schooling in, say, Washington DC, USA.

"We can tackle any academic subject - philosophy, psychology, nursing, education, physics," he lists, counting them off on his fingers, "criminology, hospitality management, ethics, management."

While the trade remains highly illegal and controversial, the rules governing the world of academic writing have made it hard to regulate it, nab the culprits and rein in the global network of highly-secret essay writers and kill the industry.

While speaking to the BBC, Dr Gladys Nyachieo, a sociology lecturer at Nairobi's Multimedia University, said that the greatest responsibility for tackling essay cheating lay with the wealthy, Western countries whose students are the main customers adding that without such a demand there wouldn't be a supply.

"If they could do something about it, in terms of making it outlawed on the other side, you know, the US, the UK, then it would reduce. You wouldn't have so many Kenyans invested in academic writing and passing it off as an honest way of making a living," she said.