Officials in Cameroon say armed separatists have chased several thousand children from schools just days after the students returned to classrooms for the first time in years. Troops sent to restore school security in the western regions say they have killed at least 13 rebels in clashes over the last month.

Cameroon’s military says separatist attacks this month on western villages, mostly on schools, sent thousands of schoolchildren, teachers and villagers fleeing for safety.

Lingalla Prudence is among students who on Monday fled Kumbo, an English-speaking town in the Northwest Region. The separatist conflict has disrupted her education so often that the 21-year-old, who should be in college, is still trying to finish high school.

“We were in school, and some people brought guns and chased us out of the school and kidnapped some teachers and all the children are out of school,” she said.

Teachers’ associations say the Anglophone rebels are targeting state schools, which they view as a tool of the French-speaking majority’s rule. But they are also attacking religious and private schools.

Joe Tiemuncho, coordinator of the Parent-Teachers Association for Presbyterian schools in Cameroon, said separatist attacks and threats have shut down scores of schools that had reopened, some for the first time in years, when the school year started on September 5.

“Many schools have shut down given the intimidations that are coming from separatist fighters,” he said. “Teachers, learners and school managers are afraid to get into full-swing activities because it is unpredictable, you can’t say what will happen in the next few minutes. Some teachers have even had their arms amputated. Students have been kidnapped and they [fighters] continue to kidnap teachers, students and others asking for ransom.”

Cameroonian military spokespersons weren’t allowed to speak with reporters on a trip to the area, but they did confirm that hundreds of troops were deployed to restore security so classes can resume.

The military says the separatists also declared a lockdown in the English-speaking western regions that paralyzed trade. Separatists that declared the lockdown say it is in response to a government ban on community schools that the rebels control.

Cameroon in August closed more than 200 community schools that rebels said they controlled.

The military says in the past week troops killed at least 13 rebels during clashes in the towns of Kumbo, Oku and Ndop.

Rebel spokesman Daniel confirmed their fighters were killed and said they also killed government troops.

Cameroon’s military did not confirm any fatalities but said a few troops were wounded.

Cameroon’s anglophone rebels want to create a breakaway state they call Ambazonia, separate from Cameroon’s French-speaking majority. The U.N. says the rebel conflict has killed more than 3,300 people and displaced more than a half-million since fighting broke out in 2017.

Culled from the VOA

The foundation of any state is the education of its youths. Unfortunately, this does not apply to Southern Cameroons where over a million children in the region’s rural areas have been held captive by Amba fighters who have very little faith in education and the Yaoundé government which does not really care if some of its citizens are in school or not.

For more than five years, many children in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions have been robbed of their right to education following a strike by lawyers and teachers which met with extreme violence from the Biya regime.

The violence which ensued has not only killed many young children, it is still having a huge impact on the most vulnerable segments of the society, especially children in rural regions of Southern Cameroons who are being threatened with death by Amba fighters who hold that no child should go to school until Southern Cameroons gets its independence from the Republic of Cameroon.

Schools effectively started in Cameroon last week, but many children in Akwaya Subdivision, Mamfe Central Subdivision, Eyumojock Subdivision and Upper Bayang Subdivision, all of which are in Manyu Division, are still at home, hoping that a miracle will occur for the so-called Amba fighters to allow them to go to school.

Cameroon Concord News last week sent a team to Manyu Division to find out if rural kids were back in school, but it turned out that school resumption which is supposed to be national is indeed not national as many Manyu kids are still at home.

Children in Kendem, Ossing, Kembong, Ntenako, Ndekwai, Sumbe, Akriba, Mbinjong and Bakebe are still at home with many really worried about their future as the years go by.

According to the Cameroon Concord News team, the blame lies squarely with the separatists who are determined to rob the children of their right to education.

Many parents are very disappointed and mad at the separatists but they cannot speak up because of the presence of gun-toting irresponsible Amba fighters who still erroneously think that their country will be the best without its people going to school once the Yaoundé government grants independence to the two English-speaking regions of the country.

“We are really desperate. Our children have been at home for more than five years and there is no sign that the independence will ever come. We need help. Our liberators have become a huge problem onto us and our children. If the Biya government is really a problem as Amba fighters tell us, it at least allows children to go to school in East Cameroon. The new invisible administration, which manufactured false hope for us, is now a millstone around our necks,” an angry parent who brought two of his young children to Mamfe town for them to go to school said.

“We are stuck with this rogues who are permanently threatening to kill us if we send our children to school. Which nation has ever developed without its population being educated?” he asked.

In Ntenako and Ndekwai where the schools have been invaded by wild weeds, the parents have begun speaking up against the band of criminals who pass off as liberators.

Speaking to the Cameroon Concord News team, an agree parent who elected anonymity said that “we can longer allow this to continue. We must work with the government for these rogues to be arrested or killed by the military. They came here promising to protect us, but we now need protection against them. Our children cannot go to school and the idle criminals keep harvesting our crops without our permission. We are scared of talking but if the government could deploy more troops here we will report all those boys who are making life unbearable to us,” he said.

“Some of these criminals even sleep with our daughters and wives for free and many are even pregnant for these thieves. We are really frustrated and we are using this medium to call on the government to come and help us. We are stuck,” he said angrily.

Even if the separatists call for a resumption of schools in the rural areas of Southern Cameroons, it will take years for things to return to normal. Most teachers in those rural areas have fled and many cannot be accounted for. Some have even left the country, but they are still receiving their salaries.

Worst of all, some of the school infrastructure is decaying and some villagers are even stealing school property.

In Ossing in Manyu Division, a bunch of low class, ill-behaved commoners have taken off the roofing sheets of the Ossing Government Primary and Secondary Schools and sold to some villagers.

All the academic and other records have been soaked by rain because these criminals took off the roofing sheets.

Currently, the Ossing Village Council is working hard to bring those who have committed these odious crimes to justice.

Some of those who purchased the sheets have been identified and they are being made to pay hefty fines for purchasing stolen property, a city councilor who elected anonymity told the Cameroon Concord News team.

“It is unfortunate that our own people are destroying our own infrastructure. How can we ever develop if our own people cannot go to school. I have never known a worse revolution than this,” he regretted.

I hope time will bring some wisdom to this revolution which is completely off its rails. Its leaders are completely unhinged and they are simply unaware of the adverse consequences of their misguided actions, he concluded.

By Our senior international correspondent Dylan Tambe Ashu

Cameroon’s power utility threatened to take retaliatory steps against the University of Douala, citing payment concerns. Eneo said it would suspend electricity supply to the university if it does not repay the CFA1.7 billion in unpaid bills it owes.

“Errors and omissions exempted, the review of your accounts in our books to date reveals that you still owe us CFA1,760,818,212, excluding interest on arrears,” the company wrote as a “formal notice to pay before suspending the supply of electricity.”

This situation highlights the issue of unpaid bills within public administrations. As a reminder, the government has begun to implement a plan to repay a total of CFA182 billion of debt to Eneo from December 2021.

Source: Business in Cameroon

President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the U.S. government will forgive $10,000 in student loans for millions of debt-saddled former college students, keeping a pledge he made in the 2020 campaign for the White House.

The move could boost support for his fellow Democrats in the November congressional elections, but some economists said it may fuel inflation and some Republicans in the U.S. Congress questioned whether the president had the legal authority to cancel the debt.

Debt forgiveness will free up hundreds of billions of dollars for new consumer spending that could be aimed at homebuying and other big-ticket expenses, according to economists who said this would add a new wrinkle to the country’s inflation fight.

The actions are “for families that need them the most – working and middle class people hit especially hard during the pandemic,” Biden said during remarks at the White House. He pledged no high-income households would benefit, addressing a central criticism of the plan.

“I will never apologise for helping working Americans and middle class, especially not to the same folks who voted for a $2 trillion tax cut that mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations,” Biden said, referring to a Republican tax cut passed under former President Donald Trump.

Borrower balances have been frozen since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, with no payments required on most federal student loans since March 2020. Many Democrats had pushed for Biden to forgive as much as $50,000 per borrower.

Republicans mostly opposed student loan forgiveness, calling it unfair because it will disproportionately help people earning higher incomes.

“President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday.

The administration has yet to determine the price tag for the package, which will depend on how many people apply for it, White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice told reporters. Student loans obtained after June 30 this year are not eligible, she said.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters the administration has legal authority to forgive the debt under a law allowing such action during a national emergency such as a pandemic. Earlier, Republican U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik had called the plan “reckless and illegal.”

American university tuition fees are substantially higher than in most other rich countries, and U.S. consumers carry $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, most of it held by the federal government. Biden said other countries could bypass the United States economically if students are not offered economic relief.

Pandemic pause

The administration will extend a COVID-19 pandemic-linked pause on student loan repayment to year end, while forgiving $10,000 in student debt for single borrowers with annual income under $125,000 a year or married couples who earn less than $250,000, the White House said.

Some 8 million borrowers will be affected automatically, the Department of Education said; others need to apply for forgiveness.

The government is also forgiving up to $20,000 in debt for some 6 million students from low-income families who received federal Pell Grants, and proposing a new rule that protects some income from repayment plans and forgives some loan balances after 10 years of repayment, the Education Department said.

A New York Federal Reserve study shows that cutting $10,000 in federal debt for every student would amount to $321 billion and eliminate the entire balance for 11.8 million borrowers, or 31% of them.

Inflation impact

A senior Biden administration official told reporters the plan could benefit up to 43 million student borrowers, completely canceling the debt for some 20 million.

After Dec. 31, the government will resume requiring payment on remaining student loans that were paused during the pandemic. The official said this would offset any inflationary effects of the forgiveness. Payment resumptions could even have a dampening effect on prices, the official said.

Former U.S. Treasury secretary Larry Summers disagreed. He said on Twitter that debt relief “consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college. It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions.”

Similarly Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who headed the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, said debt-cancellation would nullify the deflationary powers of the Inflation Reduction Act. “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless,” he said.

Moody’s analytics chief economist Mark Zandi sided with the White House, saying the resumption of billions of dollars per month in student loan payments “will restrain growth and is disinflationary.”

Source: REUTERS

According to the Immigrations Office of Belgium, in the first six months of 2022, Cameroonian students filed a total of 646 applications, and Moroccan students filed a total of 621 applications for long-stay visas, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

Data further show that 436 Cameroonian students applied for a long-stay visa in Belgium to pursue their studies in a state higher education institute, whereas 208 of them applied for a visa to be able to attend Belgian private institutions.

As for Moroccan students, the Belgian Immigrations Office shows that 577 students from Morocco applied for a long-stay visa to continue their education in a state institute, and another 6 of them applied for a visa to pursue their education in private institutes.

Based on the number of applications filed for long-stay visas, Chinese students were ranked third. They filed a total of 241 applications. The top ten list also includes students from Turkey, India, the United States, and Iran.

As for overall data, it has been revealed that in the first half of 2022, Belgium received almost 2,100 long-term visa applications from students all over the world.

Apart from receiving and issuing a high number of long-term visas for students, the Belgian authorities also extended the long-stay ID card for around 90 per cent of applications of 2,348 students.

All students and citizens of third countries that have not reached a visa liberalisation with the EU or an agreement with the Schengen member countries need to apply for a visa in order to be permitted entry to Belgium.

Students applying for a Belgian long-stay visa must submit all the required documents such as a student visa application form, a valid passport, two passport photos, health insurance, proof of financial means, a supporting letter, proof of English proficiency, proof of non-criminal convictions, and a high school diploma.

Those applying for a student visa must prove that they have enough income to support themselves during their stay in Belgium.

The Belgium student visa costs around €200, including the application process as well as the administrative feed.

Once in Belgium, students have eight days to register at a local administration office and get a residence card. By holding such a card, students are permitted to stay in Belgium for the duration of their study course. Generally, a student visa is issued for one to two years.

Source: SchengenVisaInfo.com

Last week, the Cameroon Minister of Defense, Joseph Beti Assomo, announced that 929 military recruits had been dismissed from the military for having fake certificates. The minister added that no legal action would be taken against the criminals. The minister, however, added that the criminals had signed an undertaking never to engage in any form of crime, adding that the criminals would be closely monitored and that henceforth, the screening of recruits will be more rigorous. Cameroon Concord News sent out a team to the streets of Yaoundé to get the opinions of Cameroonians and this is what some of them had to say. For purposes of anonymity, we will only use the last names of those interviewed. 

Mr. Che (unemployed): I think it was a good thing the military did to rid itself of criminals who would have become an integral part of our defense forces. It is hard for a criminal to really become a good citizen. Because of their tricks, good citizens were left out. I think those who had good certificates but failed the exams should be brought in. However, the government should go after those who are manufacturers of fake certificates. 

Mr. Ndip (IDP):   What happened in the military is just a tip of the iceberg. Cameroonians have destroyed their country by engaging in criminal activities. How can we be sure that the military and Gendarmerie are not already full of people with fake certificates? The military has to conduct a real certificates audit for us to be sure that our security is in safe hands. We are now hearing that there are senior military officials with fake certificates. Can the military investigate this for us to be sure that we are really safe in this country?

Mr. Njoh (in Yaoundé to check on his documents): This does not come as a surprise given the rate of corruption in Cameroon. If almost a thousand fake certificates had been detected this time around, how many of such fake certificates holders are already in the police, army and gendarmerie? The government must conduct a total certificates audit of the civil service to make sure we have decent people in the system. Look at what has been happening in the country. Each time a criminal gang is dismantled, we realize that military men or police officers are part of the gang. This is testament to the fact that our uniformed officers are not men of honor.  We still have to conduct more checks to sanitize the system.

Ms. Ngando (civil servant):  I understand there is a lot of unemployment in the country, but those with fake certificates should not be considered as being unemployed. They do not have certificates and should not be part of the labor market. I have heard that there are lots of people in the civil service who are using the certificates of their brothers and sisters who are working abroad. Since their siblings will not be coming back to work in the country, they have now adopted the names and certificates of their siblings. This also needs to be checked out. In today’s Cameroon, we do not have to trust anybody. Our fellow citizens have become very fake. 

Ms. Ebenye (unemployed): Since I had my first degree from the University of Buea two years ago, I have been looking for employment and everything seems to be impossible. Many people have been telling me that I must have a godfather if not I will never succeed. If the 929 criminals made their way into the military, it means they had godfathers and that was why those fake certificates had to be certified for them to be genuine. While the criminals have been sent home, the government must ensure that their networks and godfathers should never be active again. The country’s security forces should seek those networks and destroy them so that those of us with genuine certificates can have a place under the sun. I hear the student residential areas in Buea and Yaounde are the headquarters for the fabrication of these certificates. The government should investigate these allegations. These unfortunate situations are ruining our country’s reputation.

Mr. Agbor (retiree): This is no news. This practice has been going on for a very long time. If the government wants to clean up the system, it must come up with a system that will enable it to determine if certificates submitted for employment in the country are genuine. Like someone said today during Cameroon Calling on CRTV Radio, the government should come up with a consolidated database for all schools authorized in the country where those certificates can be certified before employment is granted to anybody. We now have recruits who have been trained in the handling of weapons and have been sent home. Are we sure they will not go home to form gangs or even join the ranks of Amba fighters to continue stoking the war that is tearing that part of the country apart? This is not the first time we are hearing of fake certificates in the country. Many years ago, FEICOM hired many women, most of whom were the wives of ministers and directors and who did not have the right certificates. It is alleged that some of those certificates came for the University of Yaounde II (SOA). The government should investigate the authorities of that university. Even officials of the ministry of higher education should be investigated because it is alleged that they are aware of some of those fake certificates. 

More of the opinions will be published subsequently. 

By Brayan  Tambe   Ashu