Azong Warra, Pioneer GCE Board Registrar
Following
Presidential Decree No2018/514 of 22 October 2018 repealing and re-organising
the Cameroon GCE Board, a decree which was accompanied by widespread
condemnation and criticism, as well as praise, we set out to get the opinion of
the pioneer registrar of the Board, who alongside others, fought for the
creation of the Board, and under their leadership, the text of application was
written and used until recently, when a Presidential decree repealed the
Board’s statute ushering in some drastic changes that will greatly affect
the way the Board functions.
The Pioneer Registrar,
Azong Wara, opines that a revolution is needed to save what is left of the
Board, and that the recent decree of President Biya, has made things much worse.
Azong Wara argues that if Anglophones let it go, they will in effect be letting
go the only good thing that make them look like people, in the competitive
world of education. He frowns at the exclusion of the University of Buea, the
side-lining of teachers, side-lining lay private and denominational school
authorities and many others. He also makes a case against the flooding of the
Board with representatives of Ministries from Yaoundé, at the detriment of
educationists. He was interviewed by Andrew Nsoseka.
What do you make of the recent Presidential
decree reorganizing the GCE Board?
I will begin by looking at preamble to the
decree itself. You know these citations that usually come before presidential
decrees are very important citations. This thing where they usually say mindful
of this, mindful of mindful that; those are very important citations in respect
of the decree that follows. The most important law on education in this country
is law No. 0 4-9 8 of 14 April 1998. That is the most important law on
education in this country. You cannot talk of education without mentioning that
one because it came out of an education forum organised in this country in 1995
where everything about our educational system was studied by experts from
across the whole nation. And this law was debated in Parliament and passed in
Parliament and eventually signed into law by Presidential decree. So it is the
most important law.
So what does that law say?
That law says that there are two education
subsystems in Cameroon. The French education subsystem and an English education
subsystem and these two systems will co-exist, and will carry out their
educational activities as defined by their own education system. In other words
the subsystem of education in the English subsystem will carry out its
teaching, its examination and others, according to the English Education system
with no interference. This is clearly stated in that law and the law goes ahead
to say that a Board of Education may be created to take these education
subsystems which has not been done up today. Now the important thing I want to
say is that since that law is not mentioned in this preamble/citations. It
means that somebody does not like that law, and therefore tries to ignore it
and brings in laws here which are not even relevant to our system. So if this
decree was honestly constructed, that citation would have been there. So I
disapprove of this present decree from that perspective.
Are you saying that the structure which the
Board now has is of no relevance?
The
decree itself has violated the educational subsystem of the Anglophones so it
doesn’t hold. That’s what I’m saying. So it is effectively not there. That is
the first criticism I have of that decree.
What other criticism do you have?
The next criticism
I have is that you convert an examination Board Into a State Corporation and
you remove the academic authority of that examination Board from it. The
Academic authority over the GCE Board is the University of Buea. The person who
guarantees the authenticity of the certificates issued by the GCE Board is the
University of Buea. It is not the GCE Board Registrar. The registrar is just an
Administrator who administers the exam. He signs the certificates along with
the Vice Chancellor of the University of Buea and the Minister of Secondary
Education. The Vice Chancellor signs that certificate in order to give it
Academic integrity. The University is left out of this new structure. So the
Vice Chancellor cannot sign these certificates if he is honest with himself. He
cannot come and sign certificates organised by a system that he has no control
over. The former GCE Board had the Vice Chancellor or his representative on the
Council of the GCE Board. He also had the examinations executive committee.
That is that part which looks at the exam itself, the content of the exam. The
other one is like the Council’s administration of the board. But the actual one
that looks into the examinations and whether they meet the international
quality, whether the certificate should be given, is the examinations executive
committee. It sets the standards. It defines the mark limit. That one has been
removed from this whole new arrangement. So I don’t see how the Vice-Chancellor
can come in, to sign such a certificate. It was constructed without even
consulting the University of Buea. I know that if this text had gone through
the University of Buea, and if they are honest to themselves they will know
that this would not have been the text.
What can be done or what should have been done
to give the GCE Board the relevance that you are talking about?
In every
single country, examinations of this nature must be attached to a University. It
would be very strange to find a country somewhere where such a Board is not attached to a
university.
For example; that
of London is attached to the University of London. You do not have an
examinations Board just hanging in the air without an academic backing.
Wherever you go you will find that. The Universities are meant to consume the
products of these examination Boards. And they have no way of guaranteeing the
credibility of those exams with this text.
So how are the new changes going to affect the way
the Board will function?
What I think
will happen is that the workers of the GCE Board will receive this text with
all jubilation because it is going to raise their financial status. So if you
look at it from that aspect to them it’s a great text. If you want to look at
it from the aspect of the public and of these children who are going to obtain
these certificates it is a sham. You remove teachers who are the prime movers
of education. You have taken them out. They no longer appear in this structure.
You have taken our parents from this structure, you have taken out lay private
education, Catholic education, Protestant education authorities. You have taken
them out of the Council of the GCE Board and they are those that feed the Board.
You have taken them out and left the Board with Ministers and civil servants.
Sooner or later you
will just sit here and have Yaounde appoint somebody from the Ministry to come
to the GCE Board and it may not even be somebody who is versed with the Anglo-Saxon
system of education because it required that before you make a registrar in
those days it is required that the Council of the GCE Board which was made up
of all these people, it required that they examine the credentials of such a
person who must be very highly knowledgeable in the Anglo-Saxon system of
education, before the Prime Minister appoints him. The Prime Minister appointed
such a person only to give him the authority of the seal of state, but it was
the Council that decided after studying the credentials of such a person that
this person qualified to handle exams of that nature.
And that Council as I said had teachers, people
who were the prime movers.
The number has
reduced and if it was for instance, that they had said one teacher, one person
from these education bodies, one person from the University and they build a
number up to seven, those are the relevant people, but if you say one
person for Ministry of Finance, one person from the Prime Minister’s office one
person from head of State. You can go to these ministries and pick anybody who
is not even an educationist. You will find out now at the Presidency, people
beginning to position themselves to come to the GCE board Council because it is
now a corporation and that will be an issue of money. The government will pump
money just to come and manipulate with the
money. They are not coming with any idea on how to carry the GCE Board forward.
This new decree, doesn’t it give the GCE Board
more autonomy?
No! What autonomy? It instead cages the
GCE Board into the Ministries. It doesn’t give it any independence. You know
when you want to talk about independence, there must be a system in that
independent structure where they can be debate, where decisions can be taken by
a clear majority opinion. And where people can argue to agree and disagree but
when there are other people appointed by Ministers who sit in Yaounde. When
they come here are you expecting the Minister’s representatives to come and
disagree with the Minister of finance’s position? No!
What now happens to the quality of certificates
that are issued by the Board?
You’ve seen the type of certificates that were
issued this year and they are being withdrawn and reissued because the people
who have come to manage the Board do not follow the text. They are only bent on
producing this type of things. And I have myself written to the chairman of the
GCE Board proposing that a commission of inquiry should be set up to see what
went wrong with this year’s GCE. This is not a GCE and I can tell you straight
away. People have come into the place and taken off the nucleus of the
institution. How can you imagine that OMR forms, Optimal Map Readers forms,
which were supposed to be designed with machines in the Board for production,
are now done in the Quarters? The machines have deliberately been broken down
so that now people go to the Quarters to print OMR forms to send out for
students to write. So eventually the MCQs this year which are answered using
those forms were in fact this year, answered on ordinary paper and they had to
take people to mark them whereas before, those papers were usually sent into
the machine and it read out the marks and assigned them correctly to the
students. So now you have them running left and right, looking for where to fit
a mark, and hurriedly producing results which have landed us into this problem
of today.
So what could be responsible for such
irresponsible behaviour that is affecting the credibility of the Board?
It is there,
inside the Board. It started when these guys were appointed. I made a
point before. The first thing is that the Council of the GCE Board did not sit
down to study the application of the Registrar of the GCE Board. When the
present Registrar was appointed I raised an objection. This registrar has not
fulfilled the requirements of the text. He did not apply to be Registrar
through the Council of GCE Board. They did not study his credentials. He just
came from the Ministry and was appointed without passing through the Board. I
make no apologies for what I’m saying. If he was appointed regularly here, his
dossier would have been rejected here, because he would not have met the
requirements.
I know what rolled
the plate during the struggle for the GCE Board I know the rules but they came
from behind and jumped into the place. As soon as they jumped into the Board,
they now developed problems with the staff. They started moving the experienced
ones into different positions and moving the people who could conform with
their agenda to certain positions. That brought about this problem in the GCE
Board. Nobody is bold enough to accept that it should be investigated. If they
investigate they will discover that that is the reason.
What can be done to bring the Board to what you
fought for? What was your ideal programme for the Board?
The first thing is that we must go back. It is
the salvation of Anglophones in this country. It is the only institution that Anglophones
actually sacrificed to get. There were fights for the University and so on. But
the actual fight in this Country which was the hope of all Anglophones was the
GCE Board and no one should mess with it. If you mess it up, you have messed
with the future of Anglophones in this Country. All these troubles that we are
having in this country are related to our education because for over the time
people are not happy that there is a GCE Board. People come to mess it up. If
the Anglophones let it go. If they let it go through this shoddy arrangement
then we are off. The entire GCE is destroyed. That is the only thing that makes
us look like people when we get out of this country.
Is there any positive thing in the decree?
There is a positive aspect to this text, the
fact that the technical exams have been given proper nomenclature. I can’t
think of any other. I don’t know whether there’s any other thing in this thing
that is positive. If that thing is extracted and put back on the original text
of the GCE Board, we will have no problem. All these arrangement is for money.
All these things that they are manipulating the GCE Board is to generate more
money and put it in their pockets. That’s all that is causing them to be
looking for laws to twist about. The original text was well studied and written
and it was brought to light for all of us Anglophones to see. They criticised
it and they took it back and came out with a good text. 25 years is not enough
time to come and whitewash it.
The text could stay for a hundred thousand years
as it.
It was good. The
only thing was that it doesn’t give enough money to some people who are coming
to manipulate the place and because of that they want someone to put in their
pockets. So they mess around with the text.
If you were asked to describe what has happened
to the Board, what will you say?
In the respect of exams itself, the conduct of
the exams has been completely destroyed and we need a revolution in that GCE
Board. In my letter to the Chairman, I have said that this registrar should be
sent back to the Ministry. I don’t hide my words.
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