Francophone teachers to begin strike on
March 27
- The teachers are asking for better wages
and allowances
By Nche Jude Mbah in Yaounde
You might not have heard that Francophone
teachers in East Cameroon are threatening to go on strike on March 27. Sure,
their working conditions are terrible; school buildings falling apart, outdated
didactic materials, morally depraved and unruly students, extremely corrupt
school administrators, and even more corrupt bureaucratic officials in the
ministries of basic and secondary education. These are all excellent causes for
teachers to walk off the job.
But
do you think any of these circumstances are mentioned in the reasons for the
threatened strike? Not even one. The Francophone teachers are simply asking for
more money in salaries and other allowances.
All of us are painfully aware that
Anglophone teachers have been on strike since November, a large minority of
them without pay. Their working conditions are not much better than those of
their Francophone colleagues but for the fact that their students are better
behaved. But their strike was motivated by moral and ethical principles, not
bigger pay packets.
It’s not that Anglophone teachers would not
welcome a few more francs in their pockets. But faced with the tide of
francophonization that has been threatening to overwhelm and ultimately
eradicate the Anglo-Saxon system of education, Anglophone teachers choose to
act in a cause greater than their own personal well-being. They chose to defend
their system of education whose comparative excellence was drawing an
ever-increasing horde of undisciplined, badly brought up Francophone children
fleeing the failing East Cameroonian model.
Our
teachers choose to protect our children from the contagion of the corrupt,
ineffective Francophone model of education at the expense of their own
financial interests, their freedom (their leaders locked up in Yaoundé) and
even their lives.
I’ve
stopped myself from feeling sorry for Francophone parents who are flooding even
our village schools with their ungovernable children. If they had stood up to
the corruption of their authorities and tried to emulate what was going on in
West Cameroon, instead of mocking us as an inferior species of humans, they
would not now be subjecting themselves to the humiliating spectacle of sending
their children to schools in FruKangkang and other such exotic places in West
Cameroon. They soiled themselves and thought they could get away from the stink
by running to join us, succeeding only to make all of us smell bad.
Remember
that the teachers joined an ongoing lawyers’ strike that was based on the same
general principles: francophonization of their legal and judicial system,
French-only legal texts, incompetent and highly corrupt Francophone magistrates
and prosecutors flooding their courts and administering ‘justice’ in the
language of their oppressors.
Both
strikes remain in full force, schools are shuttered and the people of West
Cameroon show their support for, and solidarity with the strikers by staying
home every Monday, or however many days a week as directed by the strike
leaders from their jail cells.
Biya’s
unpleasant options
President Paul Biya faces some stark
choices, none of which is particularly appetizing. His latest attempt to
disrupt the strikes by dispatching his Prime Minister Philemon Yunji Yang back
to the North West region was a humiliating exercise for both men.
Observers
were scratching their heads, wondering what Biya and Yang thought they could
accomplish, since Yang brought the same bag of tricks that the government had
used over and over without any success. The same threats, the same attempts at
bribery, the same cajoleries. It was like that definition of insanity, which
says it is when you do the same thing over and over and expect different
results.
Based
on this, critics say, that Yang might lose his job in the coming weeks which
will no longer be a matter for debate. But Biya should know by now that West
Cameroonians are no longer interested in the occasional games of ministerial
musical chairs he plays with his cronies in Yaoundé.
We’ve stopped caring about who is Prime
Minister, Minister or General. All we care about now is the right to govern
ourselves and to decide, through free and fair elections, who governs us.
So,
Biya must make a painful choice in the next few weeks. He will either mount
such a campaign of repression in West Cameroon that it would instantly be recognized
as a bloodbath, because nothing short of that will return us to business as
formally usual; he might have to destroy us to rule us!
But
with the international community beginning to ride him hard, this might be
difficult to pull off (he had a less than cordial meeting with the British high
commissioner in Yaoundé last week). Also, the days when such atrocities could
be carried out in secret are long gone. West Cameroon is crawling with the
likes of Collins Nji, the 17-year-old Bamenda youngster who in January became
the first African to win the global Google Code-in contest, whose prowess on
all things digital will ensure that nothing Biya does will remain hidden or go
unreported.
The
other equally painful choice for Biya will be to climb down from his perch and
negotiate directly with those Consortium leaders with whom he initially
negotiated and, when they would not give in to his threats, had them locked up.
As
for Biya’s view of Anglophones, this is where the octogenarian would be likely
to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in
a mystery inside an enigma.” Never has Biya or any other dictator been so
confronted with the phenomenon of a population destabilizing his regime by
simply staying at home.
No
demonstrators marching with placards, no rioters or looters presenting easy
targets for the military or police to shoot and kill. Just the empty streets of
Kumba and Kumbo, Mbengwi and Menji, Buea and Babungo which characterized just
peaceful silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment