Allegations of leakage, attempts to discredit GCE Board

A few months ago, the Registrar of the GCE Board issued a public statement cautioning Cameroonians about some fake GCE questions which were being circulated and warning candidates to steer clear of such malpractices. Those were not GCE questions but the perpetrators of the act wanted the potential candidates to know that GCE questions can leak.

It must be said that for at least 17 years the GCE Board has been a member of an international assessment organisation where methods of guaranteeing the security of public examinations is studied and practised as a system. A system in which handling such examination malpractices as leakages are taught and can be dealt with spontaneously.

The only problem that the GCE Board will face with this year’s leakage, as always, will be the financial cost of handling the problem, especially as we are dealing with a Government which refused the creation of an assessment organisation and has never repented for it.

Assessment boards are not in the psyche of the entire Francophone world. The Francophone educational culture has absolutely no resemblance with the Anglo-saxon type which the English–speaking people of Cameroon inherited and hold very dearly. That is why the two cultures in Cameroon have always had difficulty accommodating each other.

At the moment of writing, the GCE Board has already dealt with the present leakage. But the question that begs itself is who commandeered this scam and for what purpose? Surely some candidates will be arrested and charged. But sometimes these are the small fry. My personal thoughts indicate that no well-meaning citizen of the former Southern Cameroons will engage himself in such an act, and with such careless abandon.

One can excuse the Registrar if he contends that there was no leakage for what happened is actually an act of sabotage. The recklessness of the act smacks of a deliberate intention to destroy and degrade a system that is acknowledged the world over as a reliable system of standards and values.

From 1963, is has only been the government of Cameroon that has systematically deployed huge amounts of time as well as financial, material and human resources only to destroy Anglo-Saxon values and standards in Cameroon. The idea is to give a dog a bad name to hang it.

So, those who orchestrated this scam just set out to expose the system, discredit it and take advantage of the confusion thus created to impose their own agenda.

At the moment of writing this piece, the origin of the leakage has still not been traced, despite the fact that both the GCE Board and the various teachers’ trade unions are making frantic efforts to find the real culprits. And this writer can bet that the final report of the investigations will, at best, be sketchy. The real culprit will remain in the dark.

The leakage was transmitted mostly by SMS on mobile phones. One investigator said his tracking with the MTN and Orange networks ended up with some old telephone numbers which have lain unused for many years. And some of the names attached to some of the phone numbers were Francophone names.

Another important question could be; who benefits from the act? The person who benefits from it is capable of orchestrating it. This year’s leakage is exactly akin to the one which took place in 1996, except that it is in a much smaller scale. So, who leaked the 2015 GCE examination?

Riding on the back of the 1996 leakage and the statements that were being uttered by Anglophone detractors of the GCE Board cause, at the time, the Government set up a committee of investigation and put Dr. Herbert NganjoEndeley (RIP) in charge. At the end (November 1996) Dr. Endeley declared on the radio news and analysis programme (Cameroon Calling) that part of the running of the GCE should go back to the Government.

A few months later (February 1997) he was appointed Chairman of the GCE Board. The pioneer Chairman, Sylvester N. Dioh, who gave his all, risking his career and even his life to fight for the board was, thus, ignominiously, replaced by someone who said (about the three-year struggle between the Anglophones and the Francophone Government of Cameroon), that the struggle for the board was a bid by the “graffis” to climb into power.

Being the lynchpin of the government, Dr. Endeley immediately embarked on getting the pioneer members of the GCE Board Council replaced with people he could easily manipulate into voting Andrew Azong-Wara, the pioneer Registrar of the Board, out. That is how Azong-Wara did only three years at the helm of the Board and many Cameroonians today just don’t even remember him at all. But this is the mechanism with which the Government hijacked the GCE Board and the Anglophones who are the immediate benefactors of that institution are no better off for it.

Since then, the entire running of the GCE Board has been in the hands of the entirely Francophone Government of Cameroon who don’t even possess an inkling of assessment knowledge or ability since it is not part of their educational culture. They regularly starve the Board of necessary finance so as to remain in charge: “C’est nous qui payons, nous devonsgéré”. They have brought Francophones to dominate the governing council of the GCE Board as well as the Examinations Executive Committee which is the highest academic body of the board.

This was easy to achieve since the Anglophones who now manage the board are apologists of the Government. So, having had Anglophone apologists of the regime at the helm of the Board for almost 18 years, the Government might just be thinking that it is time to move it one notch up by getting a pure Francophone as Registrar.

So, this leakage would serve (as in 1996) as an excuse to manipulate the Anglophones and bring in a Francophone as Registrar. This view of things now gives credence to recent reports from some newspapers, purporting that the Government wants to appoint a Francophone as Registrar of the GCE Board.

And that the proposed Registrar in question is Dr. Rose Njilla, who is of the Supreme State Control and lectures at the University of Dschang. She has been a member of the GCE Board’s finance commission for over seven years and so she masters the financial management of the Board to her finger tips. It will be easy for her to manage the Board, except that it will be another insult to the English–speaking people of Cameroon.

Already, she deployed herself to move around the country “monitoring” the organisation of the GCE. Their own Francophone exams, the Baccaleaureat, constantly languishes in doldrums for lack of proper management ability, but she wants to observe the GCE about which she is, at most, an adventurer.

The bicultural heritage of this country is a blessing, an asset; but the way the Francophone Government is ignoring it in some parts and using its demographic superiority in other parts to suppress the English-speaking component can only be the ingredients of which conflict is made.

By Samuel Sumediang

Mile 16, Bolifamba, Buea