ENS/FMBS entrance exams - potential candidates increasingly impatient

The wait is already long and candidates increasing hoping against hope. Panic stricken, some potential candidates for this year's competitive entrance examinations into the Advanced Teachers' Training Colleges (ENS Yaounde, Bambili and Maroua) and the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Yaounde 1, say the delay is already going beyond imagination.

The anxiety that usually characterises the period around these exams is fast giving way to frustration as most fresh school-leavers who have been dreaming to embrace their life carriers in these schools are already foreseeing dashed hopes. Be it in the nation's capital city, Yaounde or other towns that have in the past hosted these examinations, the anxiety to see the various examinations launched is gradually dying down with rumours taking centre stage.

In Bamenda and Bambili to be specific, some candidates who had taken up residence there to register and prepare for the entrance exams are already reportedly leaving the area back to their bases. "I have been in Bambili for over six weeks waiting for the launching of the exams. Rumours are rife there that because of the recruitment of 25,000 certificate holders into the public service, government no longer has money to sustain teachers who would have been recruited through this year's entrance exams and so the entrance will be suspended for at least two years," says Celestine Chianan, just back from Bambili. The rumours are near confirmed by reports in some newspapers giving justifications for the non-launching of the exams. According to a photocopy of the said article published in one of the English-speaking newspaper, which the candidate brandished to Cameroon Tribune, one could read the 25,000 recruitment, the massive intake of ENS Maroua, among others as justifications for why the exams will not be launched. Sylvie Miyeh, Modern Letters student in the University of Yaounde I, vying for admission into ENS Yaounde, like Celestine, is at a loss. But she and her mates Cameroon Tribune met at the weekend continue to prepare themselves hoping for a miracle. Like others, going to ENS campus or visiting the Ministry of Higher Education's website to see if the much-awaited communiqué announcing the exams is out, is already a daily, if not, an hourly routine.

But when Cameroon Tribune approached officials of the Ministry of Higher Education, information garnered reveal that so many things, not far from the rumours, had to be put in place but that the exams will be launched after all.