IRIC quotas, universities, and national solidarity

The fumbling of the regime following the public uproar on the recent imbroglio over admissions into the Institute of international Relations (IRIC) shows that our silence has usually been the greatest power behind impunity. After all, what was done was what has always been done.

The difference was that this time around, many protest voices were raised! The uproar generated a lot of questions about universities, meritocracy and the place of morality in the conduct of state affairs.

An editorial of a local newspaper Villes & Communes titled “Que vaut encore l’université?” [Are universities still worth anything?], stated as follows: “L’université camerounaise ne se sent même plus gênée de ne pas faire partie des meilleures du continent…” [The university in Cameroon no longer even feels ashamed of not being among the best in the continent…]

Core requirements for the promotion of the work of the mind and the creative spirit expected in universities are a dense concentration of human talent, a competitive environment, easy access to financial resources, and a supportive regulatory environment.

Barring the motion-of-support jittery lot in university campuses, Cameroon universities, like universities all over the world, are filled with talented people, most of whom are anxious to contribute to the advancement of society.

University campuses in Cameroon have Dons with a lively intellectual curiosity and a feeling of special responsibility for envisioning a future that is not just a straight-line projection of the present.

Many of them have a sense of personal responsibility for the expectations of society for universities to be centers where strategies for the use of raw materials like information, imagination, invention and innovation to create wealth and newness are discussed and sometimes implemented.

Unfortunately, the Cameroon university environment is highly tainted by regime politics characterized by political appointments, misdirected financial flows, self-serving regulations, and dampened competitive productivity.

Imagine that the Director of IRIC does not even have a terminal degree, but lords it over professors! Examples like that abound in our university campuses.

This creates a hostile environment which, with the motion-of-support spirit, creates a vicious cycle that frustrates freedom of thought and cages human ingenuity. Consequently, meeting the benchmarks that cause universities to join the league of quality universities still has to wait.

IRIC is part of the university of Yaounde system. The problem of admission into the school posed a serious academic question about meritocracy. Merit, talent, innovation and creativity are bedfellows. Most of the time, they are products of nurture, not nature.

The ideal situation for a country would be that when competitive examinations are organized for admission into academic institutions, the unadulterated outcome should show an even distribution of merit and talent across the country. When they are not evenly distributed among communities, government policies are supposed to be used to bring evenness not through quotas but through targeted infusion of knowledge and skills.

Therefore as far as academic institutions are concerned, the policy of quotas as instituted in 1982 was supposed to be just a path to the final destination of equilibrating merit and talent in all regions of the country through implementing appropriate government policies.

Politics of representation usually influences the origins of members of parliament, members of government, directors of a public corporation, etc.

In this light, the CPDM regime has maintained a practice that has turned an area of the country into what is today described as “pays organsateur” [area that calls the shots], with the nucleus being the region of origin of Paul Biya. The regime has therefore failed woefully to practice the politics of representation according to the demands of equality of opportunity and equity.

It is unfortunate that these people who call the shots have distorted the politics of “representation” instituted in 1982 by the provincial “quotas” in public administrative competitive examinations. They have turned it into another ruse to cover the fraud that is used during each examination cycle to place the kith and kin of regime barons in various state institutions, at the detriment of merit.

If, as an example, the answer sheets of all those who sat for the IRIC entrance examination are held up to public scrutiny, I have no doubt that most of the decisions that were taken would turn out to have been based on considerations that had nothing to do with merit.

The central concerns of the so-called quota system as implemented today are not positive or negative discrimination that some university don-cum-“Agrégé de droit public” has tried to justify with examples from across the globe. Such futile academic efforts always fail to do a global analysis of the regime’s performance during the last 30 years on the “politics of representation” that the quota system reflects. If they did, they would easily reach the same conclusion that the newspaper CamerPress reached after an analysis of the origins of heads of state corporations, that the “pays organisateur” dominates state corporations!

Like all other domains of knowledge, diplomacy and international relations can be taught in regular faculties of universities. The practical part of such training would be done in various embassies, ministries and other appropriate collaborating institutions. The state would then constitute its pool of “diplomats” from graduates of the faculties, according to need.

The colonial policy of maintaining “elite” institutions to train a few chosen elite candidates rather than training a critical mass of youths that is internationally competitive, and can find employment either with government or with local and international organizations is no longer good for a country like ours.

The quota system as a politics of representation was supposed to be a transitory means of building solidarity among citizens. In spite of the glaring failures of the regime in the implementation of the politics so far, the collective feeling of national solidarity does not seem to have been dented.

Indeed, the war against Boko Haram has generated marches and fundraising activities that seem to be a show of national “solidarity.” It is like citizens are showing these manipulators of the politics of “representation” the road of integrity and morality that leads to national solidarity.

They are also showing the road that Paul Biya failed to take – hold consultative meetings with all political and civil society leaders in the country in relation to the war against the terrorist sect.

It is this failure to take a route that mobilises all of us that has caused some political agitators to try to turn the campaign into a partisan operation!

We just have to consider the meetings held by François Hollande with all political leaders in France, including with Marine Le Pen before the grand Paris March for Charlie to understand what it takes for a leader to build national solidarity around a national crisis.