BY KINGSLEY AKO TANYI
He is an ardent
and devout militant of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Party, CPDM. His
actions within the party so far portray him as one who favours the philosophy
of progress, reform and the protection of civil liberties. He has also, on
several occasions, been sent by his party hierarchy on crucial missions within his
native Fako.
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| Humphrey Ekema Monono |
His oratory and
eloquence make him an accomplished public speaker, combined with his decades of
experience as an exemplary teacher and pedagogue. His inventive mind finely
blends with his managerial savvy.The simple and down-to-earth attitude of this gentleman keeps him at the reach of every one who needs his help or attention.
His ever-smiling
countenance and the God-given nature of an extrovert that he is are a plus for
a public figure of his nature. He is generous, intelligent, a workaholic and is
no less a man endowed with a rare sense of humour.
His name is
Humphrey Ekema Monono. He heads Cameroon’s biggest examination body, the
Cameroon General Certificate of Education board, GCE.
The GCE Board
has had three Registrars since inception. The pioneer one was Dr. Andrew
Azong Wara, one of those influential individuals who fronted the struggle for
the creation of the Board. Late Dr. Omer Weyi Yembe, who was known for his
sternness, was the second. He took over from Dr. Azong Wara and led the Board
for a decade.
Humphrey Ekema
Monono is the strong man who now heads the Board. A Prime Ministerial order of
Tuesday 14 March 2006 catapulted him to that prestigious yet demanding post of
responsibility. Monono’s appointment, it would be recalled, came just a little
over a month after a Presidential decree had appointed Prof. Peter Alonge Abety
as Chairman of the Board, in replacement of Dr. Herbert Nganjo Endeley.
Observers
postulate that Monono’s appointment was well merited. They say since ascending
to the helm of the Board, he has not stopped displaying his dexterity and
adroitness in educational management and that his inventive mind has never
stopped bearing fruits.
In fact before that appointment,
he had had so rich a career background.He started work with the Department of
Examinations in at the ministry of National Education in Yaoundé when Prof.
Dorothy Limunga Njeuma was then Vice Minister of the said ministry.
Thereafter, he had a supersonic
leap forward: after a brief spell as a Discipline Master and Vice Principal in
the Government Bilingual Grammar School in Molyko, Buea, he was shot forth to
the position of Principal of Government High School, Kumba, before returning to
Molyko in the same capacity.
Monono then went back to Yaounde
where held the post of Director of Secondary Education before moving on, in
2005, as an Inspector General in charge of General Education, whose job
entailed overseeing the administration of schools country-wide.
The GCE Board, with Monono, has
over the years tried to match up with the exigencies of the ever-changing
world. In the domain of technology, the Board long saw the need to create a user-friendly
website (www.camgceb.org) to enable people find information about
its activities on the internet. In 2012, the Board also introduced an
electronic system of registration (E-registration) for candidates as is the
case with most examination Boards and institutions of learning across the
world.
Although many criticized the
system, the Registrar however maintained that the innovation helped in reducing
errors linked to the registration of candidates. Through the system, various
examination centres forward to the Board, Compact Discs or Flash pens from which
the latter copies the list of registered candidates on to a central server.
Last year, Monono introduced a
novelty in the release of GCE results, whereby candidates got their results
through text messages. This stirred controversy but the Registrar again made a
good case for the Board. In a press conference and on different other media
platforms, he stated, among other justifications, that the Board had to move
with the times and that it was also committed to guaranteeing the privacy of
results of candidates which was before then undermined by the publication of
results in newspapers.
A few years ago, the Board took
another giant step in introducing the hitherto much-heralded Multiple Choice
Questions, MCQ, format in the GCE. Prior to that, a team of GCE Board officials
had embarked on a nation-wide sensitization and opinion-gathering mission with
students, parents, teachers and examiners on the MCQs issue. According to the
Board, initiating the system was to be on the same pedestal with global trends
of evaluation in exams. Today, the MCQ is succeeding and not without humongous enthusiastic
approval.
It is also thanks to Monono that
that the GCE Board today has a modern structure of its own. The over FCFA 200
million worth finely designed piece of architectural creativity stands
conspicuous in Buea, the Board’s headquarters. Secondary Education Minister,
Louis Bapes Bapes, was in Buea on 28 November last year to inaugurate the
structure in a highly colourful event that coincided with the 20th
anniversary celebration of the Board’s existence.
And because of the Registrar’s knack
for the promotion of excellence, a poetry completion was launched in prelude to the
twin event.The contest entailed writing a poem of not more than 20 lines on the
topic “Education”the results of which were published there days to the
celebration, with the winner bagging home a sum of FCFA 100,000.
The Cameroon GCE
Board was born in 1993 after a fierce crusade by some front liners of the
Teachers’ Association of Cameroon, TAC, at the time.
Two Anglophone
writers, Francis Nyamnjoh and Richard Fonteh Akum, who have published a series
of books on the struggles of the GCE crisis, opine that the establishment of
the Board was the eventual fruits of fierce battles fought by the Anglophone community in Cameroon to
salvage the General Certificate of Education, a symbol of their cherished
colonial heritage from Britain, from attempts by agents of the Ministry of
National Education to subvert it.
These battles, they hold, opposed a mobilized and determined
Anglophone civil society against numerous machinations by successive
Francophone-dominated governments to destroy their much prided educational
system in the name of 'national integration'.
Enumerating all the positive deeds of the Registrar is
something Cameroon Herald cannot do
in just this write-up but the several local and international awards won by him
are telling enough of the enormity of his works. Even when eventually he leaves
the Board for a probable promotion, Monono may not have any regrets. Rather, he
would be exceedingly elated that he left a productive
template for his successors to continue from where he stopped.
