By DOH JAMES SONKEY
The Secretary General of the Ministry of Higher Education and elite of the North West region, Professor Wilfred Gabsa Nyongbet has regretted “the ongoing recycling of illiteracy and poverty in the North West and South West regions through the prevention of children from going to school thereby widening the gap between the rich and the poor.”
While stressing that “it is unacceptable that pupils and students are being deprived of their rights to education,” Prof Gabsa decried that “Only children of the poor are unable to go to school to better their lives and that of their families tomorrow, since the rich had taken their children out of these regions and registered them in schools in other parts of the country.”
Speaking to some reporters last July 15, 2019 in Yaounde within the framework of the ongoing campaign for an effective school resumption in these regions where most learners have been out of lecture rooms for over three years now due to armed conflict between Cameroon Defence Forces and separatist fighters, the university don and political scientist said “the time has come for all of us to become part of the back-to-school crusade by encouraging our parents, brothers and sisters especially those who have decided to stay in the bushes, that it is time for us to move on. We can be solving problems while we are moving on because even in the ‘marquizards’ days, some of us were not there but those who were there tell us every day how they used to bypass all the pressure, shootings and corpses to go to school.”
Explaining that “preventing our children from going to school in the North West and South West regions means we are only shooting ourselves in the leg,” Prof Gabsa advised that “We shouldn’t be holding tight to objectives that I consider illogical. Nelson Mandela said that ‘if you want to make a society or individuals powerful, give them education’. Various American presidents have said it; some people even go to the extent of saying that ‘if people think education is expensive, they should try the cost of illiteracy’.”
Questioning that “In the end, where do we get leaders for tomorrow’s society if children are being prevented from going to school in these regions,?” he revealed that “those who have been going to school, in our own Higher education subsector, I should say, most of the English-speaking students who have written the GCE and passed with good grades have been getting scholarships on a yearly basis to study in foreign countries, so, no one should claim that our certificates are not being recognised internationally.”
Speaking as a concerned parent and elite of the North West region, he concluded that “Truly speaking, we understand that perhaps things are tight in some places but we have to understand that an educated person is by far a lot better than an uneducated society.”