By NOELA EBOB BISONG
Efforts are ongoing to revamp the education sector, one of the most hit as a result of the socio-political tensions that is plaguing Cameroon’s South West and North West regions. It would be recalled that a host of school campuses have been alighted, destroyed, abandoned and now overgrown. As a matter of fact, in many areas, pupils/students and as well as teachers and other administrative staff had longed been chased out of schools by those clamouring for school boycott for the past three years. Teachers have been targeted, with a number of them even killed gruesomely in some cases, only for practicing their noble profession. The atrocious actions of gun men have thus caused teachers in most areas in the two restive regions to flee for their lives.
The situation of the non-functioning of a majority of schools in the two Anglophone regions was at the limelight at the just ended Major National Dialogue which ran in Yaounde on September 30-October 4, 2019, with aim to seek lasting solutions to the three-year armed conflict. As fallout, information from hierarchy circulating across the South West region has it that teachers and administrative staff in non-functioning schools across the region have been given the choice to select functional schools in safer areas where they can conveniently work. At first, the information read that the teachers and administrative staff were to choose schools only in the areas of their institutions, but another which came out on Wednesday, October 9, 2019 has it that they are free to go out of their areas but limited to their regions. This second information has caused many teachers to rejoice, especially those in interior and unsafe places to move to functional schools in different towns. A teacher who spoke to The SUN on the basis of anonymity expressed satisfaction with the decision, saying it had been a nightmare for her to travel the Buea/Kumba stretch of road to attend to school issues in Kumba, after she had relocated to Limbe for safety.
As a result of the decision from hierarchy, teachers who have been out of class for years now, will henceforth have the opportunity to teach pupils. However, some principals have been quick to remind their teaching staff that the decision gives way for redeployment and not transfers, as the teachers remain staff of their posted institutions and will return to those institutions when there is calm, peace and serenity, though no one is certain when that will be.