The Roman Catholic Church
The Roman Catholic Church is no doubt the largest Christian group in Cameroon, though it was introduced into the country in 1890, much later than the other mainline churches (the Baptists in 1844 and the Presbyterian Church founded by the Basel Mission in 1884). It is truly a national church because, others have tended to be geographically delimited in the country, for example,
3 See, for example, Cameroon Report in African Economic outlook, (2001/2002) published by the
African Development Bank, Development Centre of the Organisation for Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the economic performance of Cameroon.
the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC) is an Anglophone church, the Eglise Presbyterienne Camerounaise is centred among the Bulus around Yaounde, the Union des Eglise Baptistes Camerounaise around the Littoral province and the Lutheran Church around the Adamawa province. However, this trend is slowly changing for a number of reasons among which are the determination of each group to plant churches in other areas and functionaries and businessmen who bring in their churches into areas they transfer to. In nearly all the provinces, most of the major churches can now be found, though this does not cancel the fact that each church has a centre of gravity in the area where it took root (Gifford 1997).
The Catholic Church in Cameroon is divided into five ecclesiastical provinces (Bamenda, Yaounde, Douala, Garoua and Bertoua) with twenty-three dioceses. The ecclesiastical province of Bamenda covers four dioceses (Buea, Mamfe, Kumbo and Bamenda). The province corresponds with the South West and North West civil administrative provinces of Cameroon, otherwise called the Anglophone Cameroon. It comprises thirteen civil administrative Divisions: six from the South West and seven from the North West province. This section of the country, which used to be known as Southern Cameroons, was part of the United Nation trust territory placed under British rule until 1961 when the world body gave it (including the northern section called Northern Cameroon) two options of independence: to either join the Federal Republic of Nigeria or to become part of French Cameroun. A plebiscite was conducted to this effect on February 11, 1961 and the northern section opted to join the Federal Republic of Nigeria while the southern section voted to join the Republic of Cameroun (LeVine 1964, Eyongetah and Brain 1974, Ngoh 1990, Chiabi 1997). Though it is part of the Republic of Cameroon, it retains the Anglo-Saxon tradition in most of its institutions while the rest of the country maintains the French tradition.
The Bamenda ecclesiastical province, like others, has been highly affected by the economic crisis and worried over this, the archbishop has on several occasions addressed the issue to his priests and faithful in letters and sermons. This problem has also been aggravated because the church authorities did little to encourage the local churches to be financially self-supporting. The reason for this was that much financial and missionary assistance used to be provided by benefactors and donors abroad for church projects and some other activities. Whereas the contributions from these external sources were frequent in the past, they are today a rare phenomenon.4 Rare, because the Western missionaries working with the church made most connections for assistance but now most of them are retiring and they are not being replaced because the church is becoming
4 See, For example, Maimo’s presentation during the Seventh Bamenda Ecclesiastic province Annual
self-governing and local priests are being trained. Moreover, foreign bodies are no more interested in providing aid because they want the church to be self- supporting except in projects, which have been evaluated to be very important but costly. Also since Cameroonians have a track record of misappropriation of public funds, some donors are reluctant to disburse money when they believe it would not be properly accounted for. The crisis became so severe that for the first time (1999), the ecclesiastical province had to include a Finance Commission in its convention. The convention, which took place in Bamenda, had a Finance Commission, which was charged with deliberating on how the diocese and parishes can achieve material and financial self-sufficiency in the administration of the church.5
Among the services provided by the church, which are highly affected by the crisis is education at all levels (nursery, primary and secondary). Financial difficulties have made the future of this service, to which the church attaches great importance, a matter of concern. The education crisis has its genesis from the government inconsistent policies on subvention to private schools.
Apart from external assistance from other mission bodies, it used to be state policy, when the economy was in a boom, to make grants-in-aid to religious bodies for the running of some vital services. For instance, schools and hospitals, since they were carrying out services that the state would have been obliged to provide unaided if they did not. Up till 1976, the school system in the British tradition, which obtained in the present ecclesiastical province of Bamenda, made it a legal obligation on the part of the state, to pay Grants-in-Aid to Approved Voluntary Agencies (Baptists, Basel Mission (now Presbyterian) and Catholic Schools). The actual amount of Grants-in-Aid payable was calculated by deducting the assumed local contribution (a figure which represented the expected income from school fees, and varied according to the ability of the community to pay) from the recognised expenses of a school, this later figure being made up of the total salary bill together with an allowance for other expenses. The Grants-in-Aid regulations in the British Cameroon were spelt out in the Education Ordinance No. 17 of 1952. The provisions of that ordinance in the matter of Grants-in-Aid were substantially retained in Law No 69/LW/11 of September 1969 on ‘to regulate the conduct of Primary Education in West Cameroon’. In the system, all the teachers’ salaries and insurance contributions, the costs for improvement and repair of buildings were provided by the state. The state equally provided medical assistance to the schools and grants to Teachers Training Colleges were given by the state according to their personnel. Teachers
5 See the report of the Bamenda Ecclesiastic province Seventh Catholic Convention, which took place
in Mankon 1999 and the pastoral plan, which was a follow-up of this convention for more on this commission and others.
were paid according to the same scale, taking into account their qualification and length of service and not whether they belonged to confessional or government schools.6
On 8 July 1976, the Cameroon Government passed a new Law (No. 76-15 of July 1976) to reorganize Private Education in Cameroon. This Law abolished the legislative texts, which had governed the conduct of Education in Anglophone Cameroon up to that date. In so doing, it retained nothing of value in the legislation underlying the educational system in the former West Cameroon. The Grants-in Aids regulations as spelt out in the 1952 Ordinance and in the 1969 Law were abolished and replaced by what is known as ‘Government Subvention’. The notion of Approved Voluntary Agencies as enshrined in the legislative texts of West Cameroon was abandoned and all private agencies, confessional and non-confessional alike, were lumped together under the title ‘Private Education’.
As from 1976 onwards, confessional schools began to experience a new situation in which government’s participation in the financing of confessional schools was not governed by any principled criteria. Agents of the Ministry or Ministries concerned unilaterally and arbitrarily decided the amount of subventions, which the government paid to these schools annually.
The chancy, problematical and uncertain nature of this system of government subventions starkly stands out in Law No. 87/022 of 17 December 1987 whose section 16 is couched as in the following terms:
a) The funds of a private educational establishment shall be derived from; The proprietor’s own funds,
School fees (tuition, board, canteen),
Proceeds from the various activities of the establishment or agency, Donations or legacies obtained in accordance with the laws in force, Assistance from parent-teacher associations.
b) Taking into account the available resources, the state or local authorities may, if necessary, grant subsidies to the proprietor of a given establishment.
c) Government Grants-in-Aid shall be given on the basis of criteria laid down by Decree. According to the Catholic Education Secretary Buea, government subventions to Catholic schools began to register a significant and regular decline from1985. For instance, for the year 1990/1991, the government decided to allocate only two-thirds of the amount of subvention it had allocated for the previous year 1989/1990. The following year, (1991/1992), the same two-thirds was allocated as subvention but this was disbursed in three irregular instalments. For
6 See, for instance, Ministry of Education and Social Welfare (1963), West Cameroon educational
1992/1993, the amount dropped and has persistently been dropping and irregular, as payments are made in some years and in others not.
Faced with this precarious situation, the National Episcopal Conference met in 1989 to deliberate on the problems of Catholic Education. At the end of the conference, they came out with a pastoral letter, which did not provide any practical or concrete solution to the crisis. In the letter, the Bishops only drew the attention of Christians and all people of good will to the serious problem of Catholic Education. After presenting the church’s educational philosophy and a short historical reminder in the letter on how the state used to provide maximum support to Approved Voluntary Agencies thereby making schools to function properly, the Bishops lamented on the situation at the time. They called on the government and every Christian to help rescue the schools from collapsing.7
The situation became worse as the economic crisis persisted. The state became poorer and poorer and could no longer fulfil its obligation of enabling these schools to survive. The Roman Catholic church, just like the other churches, felt the effects more than the non-confessional schools because they had relied on state subventions for long and had provided good working conditions to their teachers, which they could no longer afford to do due to state’s intransigency in subventions.
Within a short time (i.e. before 1993) that subventions were slashed and its disbursement very irregular, the mission accumulated much debt in education. A report from the Catholic Education Secretariat Buea reveals that the accumulated arrears of salaries, social security contributions and taxes for Catholic teachers of the Buea diocese alone had reached 283,626,277 CFA in1993. It became increasingly difficult for the church to employ new teachers.8 This appalling situation definitely had some adverse effects on the performance of the pupils and students. For instance, the 1993/1994 beginning of year report of the Catholic Education Secretary of the Buea Diocese reveals an average drop of eight percent in the performance of primary school pupils in the diocese, when compared with the previous year and a five percent drop in secondary education.
This brought incalculable suffering to the teachers, as they had to stay for more than fourteen months without receiving salaries. Without money, some of the teachers who stayed in rented houses were evicted because they could not pay their rents, others were unable to travel either to go home on holidays or to return from their homes to their schools, some could not provide adequate feeding for their families, others could not pay school fees for their own children and some
7 For more, see, The National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon: Pastoral Letter of the Bishops of
Cameroon about Catholic Education, January 1989, SOPECAM, Yaounde.
8 See letter of the Catholic Education Secretary Buea, August 1993, to the Provincial Delegate of Labour
South West on the plight of Catholic teachers and measures adopted for the survival of Catholic schools.
were unable to provide medical care for members of their families due to the fact that they had not been paid. As a result of this, most of the teachers had to involve themselves in diverse activities to raise additional income. Farming and trading seemed to have been the most favoured activities because with the former, one needs just a piece of land which could be hired or bought cheaply in a distance bush and with the later, a few items, which could be used to start a small business, can eventually make it grow. Moreover, these activities, if properly planned, do not disturb the teacher from performing his normal teaching assignment on weekdays. For farming, it could conveniently be carried out on Saturdays while for trading goods could be purchased on Saturdays and stocked in a place where someone or a relative is employed to be selling. Below are case studies of individuals (Epah and Nsai) who got themselves involved in these activities in a bid to overcome the economic hardship faced by Roman Catholic teachers. While Epah went into farming, which pays a lot in Buea, Nsai went into petit trading between Bamenda and Kumbo. Each of them became successful in the activity and they were able to take care of their families.
Mr Epah John (primary school teacher)
Mr Epah, who was a teacher in St Anthony School Buea in 1992, was one of the teachers who had to look for an alternative solution to the economic hardship. He is retired and a father of six. He comes from Meme Division, though he was born in Buea where his parents were labourers of the Cameroon Development Cooperation. He revealed to me that with the increasing hardship, he got involved in farming. He had problems in paying his rents, fees for his two children in Catholic colleges and another who was enrolled in his own school and in meeting other financial obligations. Moreover his wife, who was unemployed, made little or no contribution in the running of the family. To look for a long- term solution to his problems, he borrowed 400 thousand CFA at an interest rate of 15 CFA. per 1000 per month from a thrift-and-loan scheme (tontines or njangis) and bought a piece of land for farming. He did farming of yams, tomatoes and vegetables. He, together with other members of his family, worked on the farm on Saturdays and on some weekdays when he felt like not going to school because of poor working conditions. Within two years, he was able to pay back the loan including the interest. In addition, he was able to build his own house (his living home) in Buea on a piece of land he had acquired before the crisis. He revealed that farming paid him more than the teaching job which he termed ‘God’s service to the kids’.
Mr Nsai Fidelis (secondary school teacher).
On his part, Mr Nsai Fidelis, who was a teacher in Saint Augustine College Kumbo, got involved in petit trading which now has culminated in one of the biggest provision shops in Kumbo. Mr Nsai was then unmarried but claims to have had lots of financial commitments. His father died when he was still in form five in Saint Augustine College Kumbo in 1982. He is the first child in the family and he has five younger ones behind him. Because of the death of his father, he barely succeeded to go through University education in Yaounde where he read English Language. He was employed to teach in this college immediately he graduated from Yaounde in 1988. The family responsibilities he had were enormous, as he had to continue to finance the education of his younger ones. Unfortunately, his mother was a mere subsistence farmer and she could contribute nothing significant for the education of the rest of the children. Mr Nsai revealed that his ambitions in life were to go higher than the present level in education but because of family responsibilities he was obliged to pick a job with the present qualification. When salaries were slashed, he got involved in petit trading in 1994. He started with buying and retailing of items such as toilet roll, palm oil, soap etc in small quantities, which he placed on a shelf in front of his house. He bought these items in Kumbo but with increasing profits, he started going to Bamenda on weekends to buy from wholesalers and in larger quantities. The items too became diversified. As the shelf could no longer contain all the items, he fought hard and got a stall in the Kumbo main market. His wife that he married in 1997 runs the shop, which is among the biggest in the town. Mr Nsai revealed that this business provides him a source of income, which is higher than his salary with the church. He is able to take care of his family, has constructed his living home and saves money in the Credit Union every month. His three kids, brothers and sisters have little or no financial difficulties with their education.
The above cases illustrate teachers who became successful in other ventures aimed at supplementing the little salary they received from the mission. However, it would be unrealistic to believe that every teacher became successful in whatever undertaking he/she took to supplement the income. While some tried and failed for one reason or the other, others did not have that enterprising spirit to even think of doing some other thing to supplement the little salary. In fact, these were the categories of teachers we may argue suffered the crisis most. Molua and Njang are examples of teachers who fall in these categories. While Molua tried his hands in organising extra classes for GCE candidates, wherein he could raise some money but failed, Njang did not just attempt doing anything else. He instead embarked on drinking after working hours, mobilising teachers
to mount pressure on the church to improve their working conditions and in politics.
Molua (secondary school teacher)
Molua is of the Bakweri ethnic group of South West Province. He is a fair and slim gentleman, who seems to be quite active in his local congregation in Tiko. This interview was conducted at the church premises on Saturday where he was controlling the cleaning of the churchyard in preparation for Sunday worship. He is about 44 years old and a father of four boys. He was born in Buea where he did his primary and secondary education in Catholic school Buea town and Bishop Rogan College respectively. He did his high school in the Cameroon College of