By IPS Correspondents
DOUALA, Cameroon, Jul 5 1996 (IPS)

For Cameroonian high school students who had decided to sit their final year examinations in the Central African Republic (CAR), the 1995/1996 school year has ended in disaster.

Many of them were among thousands of Cameroonians repatriated by their government when soldiers mutinied in Bangui in May, but their travail began one month before and continued after.

For about a decade now, the CAR has been a way out for thousands of young people who fail a mandatory test all Cameroonian students must take in the sixth year of high school before they can sit the baccalaureat (Advanced Level) in their country.

The influx led the CAR authorities to impose higher baccalaureat fees on Cameroonian students. “They charged us 35,000 CFA francs in exam fees as against 2,000 CFA for students from the Central African Republic and other foreigners,” said Innocent Kouoh, one of the students repatriated in May.

An entire network of Cameroonian business people and high school authorities in both countries also cashed in on the CAR venture.

High school authorities here created special classes for students who failed the pre-exam test to prepare them for the CAR baccalaureat. Secondary school officials in Bangui registered the students for the examination as if they were enrolled in schools in that country. Cameroonian middlemen served as the link.

Thus, while some students actually did their final high school year (Upper Sixth) in Bangui, others simply went there to sit the Advanced Level examination. As a result, about 1,000 of the 1,500 students registered in the final year of high school in Bangui this year were Cameroonians.

But this year, things went sour. Realising that hundreds of Cameroonian students were fraudulently registering for the CAR baccalaureat, the authorities in Bangui decided to crack down on them, according to Kouoh, who had gone to Bangui in October after failing the pre-exam test in July last.

“At the end of April, the examinations director in the CAR issued a circular for all headteachers, stating that all Cameroonians who did not have their preliminary exam diploma would not sit the exam,” said Kuouh.

Parents of the young Cameroonians who were affected hurriedly formed an association and put pressure on the authorities of both countries to resolve the issue.

The result was a meeting between representatives of the association, Cameroonian Education Minister Robert Mbella Mbappe and the CAR ambassador here.

However, the ambassador insisted that only the children of diplomats and students who had done both their sixth and seventh years in high schools in Bangui would be allowed to sit the baccalaureat there.

Any further negotiations were prevented by the mutiny and the students, some of whom had remained in Bangui while their parents tried to get the Central African authorities to change their minds, were forced to return home. Faced with the prospect of losing the entire year, they appealed to the Cameroonian government to come to their rescue.

“We sent a letter to the head of state in which we explained our grievances to him,” Rene Ngoue, vice president of the Association of Cameroonian Students in the CAR, explained soon after the repatriation.

The Education Ministry later agreed to let the students sit the examination in Cameroon even though the registration date had passed and gave them three days to register.

However, only about 200 were able to do so. The rest were caught in the same trap they had run from in the first place: since they had not passed the pre-exam test in Cameroon, they could not sit the baccalaureat here.

Now that the CAR option is no longer open, parents of the affected children are thinking of sending them to other Francophone African capitals: Dakar, Abidjan, Cotonou and Ouagadougou.

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