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298 Chapter Eight Lessons from the GCE Affair odcod Gobata drew the following lessons from the GCE affair (Cameroon Post No. 190 November 17-24, 1993 p. 5): The French and their local marionettes and errand boys have put Anglophone Power to the test and seen for themselves what they are up against. As I remarked before, they showed a lot of wisdom in picking on the Anglophone educational system as the arena on which to test the success of their three-decade old policy of assimilation. Had they succeeded here, they would have known that they could overrun all the other areas without even token resistance. But we stood up like one man against them and they learned that “small no be sick”. We hope that their self-imposed delusions and illusions about having conquered and assimilated us have now disappeared. Silence is not consent and love of peace is not cowardice. We have only begun. We will demand justice and fair-play everywhere. We will demand admission of past wrongs and injustices and exact reparation, restitution and compensation. Freely and voluntarily we opted for this Union. Freely and voluntarily we shall remain in it or freely and voluntarily opt out of it again. We won the GCE battle because we sank all illusive differences and stood up like one man against a common threat. Who again remembered the so-called North West/South West divide or Protestant/Catholic rivalry when we were engaged in the fight? The traitors amongst us stood out like sore fingers but they did not belong to one side of any putative divide. When the Chairman of the GCE Board was finally named in the person of Mr. Sylvester N. Dioh, I listened carefully but I never heard anybody complain: “These graffi people have come again with their grab-all mentality” or “These South Westerners have again emerged from the wings to collect plums they never fought for and reap where they did not sow”. Instead, I heard witness after witness testifying to Mr. Dioh’s human qualities - his natural and acquired endowments, hard work, moral integrity. I don’t know Mr. Dioh personally and, up to this very moment, I still don’t know which corner of Southern Cameroons he comes R 299 from, nor do I care, but I was satisfied when someone I trust, who knows him very well, described him as “firm, free and fair”. All this proves that a meritocratic system is liable to satisfy everybody. In fact, only a meritocratic system is capable of satisfying everybody, as the son of Gobata has tried, per longum et latum to prove in this column (See No Trifling Matter of: December 12, 1991; January 6-13, & 15-22, 1992.) A meritocratic system is, moreover, inevitable in a democratic setting. The reason we value the GCE so much is that it is a meritocratic system of academic evaluation which, like justice, is completely blind to bio data. Let some of those helping to destroy the GCE today remember that, as children of poor peasants, they would never have made it in life under a less fair system than the GCE. The son of Gobata will continue preaching this doctrine of meritocracy until everybody is fed up to chocking with it. Where anybody comes from, has got nothing to do with it. The recent GCE Battle revealed something rather dramatic in this regard. It is a tale of two Agbor Tabis. Here are two brothers from the very same womb, one called John and the other Peter. They both played leading roles in the GCE imbroglio, on opposite sides of the battle line. One was ready to lay down his life for the future of our children, the other was ready to mortgage that same future for a few million francs. I tell you that the same womb can bring forth both light and darkness, angel and devil, the Messiah as well as the Judas who would sell him for less than thirty pieces of any metal. I had once drawn the contrasts between John Niba Ngu and Victor Anomah Ngu. That was before I came to know Chief John Agbor Tabi and Dr. Peter Agbor Tabi. I will surely return to this issue in future. If you are a North Westerner, ask yourself whether you stand to gain more from Ekotang Elad and Simon Munzu or from Francis Nkwain and Honourable Tamfu. If you are a South westerner, ask yourself whether it is John...

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