By As Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba prepares to officially release the 2025 KCSE results this morning, two things have quietly returned: the premium SMS service and the familiar promises about infrastructure upgrades.
The SMS short code 20076 is back in action, now charging KES 25 per query—a slight reduction from the KES 30 that became standard with last year's KJSEA results. Meanwhile, CS Ogamba has emphasized that the KNEC portal at results.knec.ac.ke has been "updated to handle the traffic spike" expected when results go live.
We've heard this before.
The Same Promise, Different Year
Every January, government officials assure the public that this year will be different. The portal will work smoothly. The infrastructure has been upgraded. Traffic won't be an issue.
And every January, within minutes of results going live, the portal either crashes completely or slows to the point of being unusable. Families refresh frantically. Students stare at loading screens. And eventually, many give up and pay the KES 25 to get results via SMS.
The 2024 KCSE results were supposed to break this cycle. The Ministry scrapped the premium SMS service entirely, committing to free portal access. When the portal predictably crashed, they didn't bring back the SMS option—they made people wait it out. It was frustrating, but at least it was free.
Then came the KJSEA results months later, and the KES 25 SMS quietly returned. No explanation for the reversal. No clarity on why Grade 9 students deserved different treatment than KCSE candidates.
Now, for 2025 KCSE, we're back to the dual system: a "free" portal that may or may not work, and a paid SMS backup for those who can't afford to wait or risk the portal failing.
The KES 25 Question
The price drop from KES 30 to KES 25 might seem like progress, but it raises uncomfortable questions. If the service can be offered at KES 25, why not KES 10? Or better yet, why charge at all?
With approximately 900,000 candidates checking results—often multiple times due to system delays—plus parents, guardians, and schools all querying, even at KES 25 per SMS, we're looking at tens of millions of shillings generated within the first 24 hours.
For a government agency already funded through billions in taxpayer money and exam registration fees paid by candidates, this isn't about cost recovery. It's a revenue stream built on anxiety and unreliable infrastructure.
The Real Test Starts Now
In the next few hours, CS Ogamba's promises about upgraded infrastructure will face their annual stress test. Either:
The portal will actually work, proving that Kenya finally invested in the cloud-based, auto-scaling infrastructure that handles traffic spikes reliably—the kind of system our banks, telcos, and private sector companies use daily.
The portal will crash or slow to a crawl, once again forcing families to choose between waiting indefinitely or paying KES 25 for information they've already paid to access.
The technical solution isn't complicated. Modern cloud platforms like AWS or Google Cloud can handle millions of simultaneous requests without breaking stride. The cost would be minimal compared to KNEC's annual budget. The technology exists. The expertise exists in Kenya's thriving tech sector.
What's been missing isn't capability—it's the political will to treat exam results as a public service rather than a revenue opportunity.
What This Reveals
Whether the portal works or crashes today, the larger issue remains: Why does Kenya's government still struggle to reliably deliver basic digital public services in 2026?
We've built systems that handle billions in mobile money transactions daily. We process tax returns, business registrations, and land records digitally. Yet every January, we act surprised when a results portal—essentially a simple database query—can't handle predictable traffic.
This isn't a technical problem. It's a priorities problem.
As results go live this morning, hundreds of thousands of Kenyan families are about to discover whether their government finally prioritized their experience, or whether the "Silicon Savannah" still can't manage what our regional neighbors handle routinely with free, reliable exam results access.
We'll be watching. And if the portal crashes again, we'll be asking the same question we ask every year: When will the excuses run out?
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