University of Buea Press Release on the May 15, 2013 Riots

On Wednesday, 15 May 2013, a band of students armed with machetes, hammers, clubs and other homemade weapons invaded the campus of the University of Buea.


In the process, they broke down doors and windows of carefully selected staff offices, destroyed furniture and equipment and looted equipment. Besides burning one administrative care valued at thirty million francs, they severely vandalised five other vehicles, students' restaurant, and smashed all the windows and doors of the security post. Nine unarmed guards on duty were severely wounded. The destruction is valued at over eighty million francs.

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Comments

[John Dinga]

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then this one of UB surely encapsulates the "Might Makes Right" idea to perfection. Still the place to be?

[Goforngats]

Criminals should face the law for destroying property and deadly assault. These students are criminals.

[Ashah Nji]

These are barbarians who call themselves "students." As someone rightfully suggested, the full wrath of the forces of law and order should be brought to bear on them. We should never lend support to idiots who don't even know what it requires to run a university, when they go on pillaging what little property UB has for thousands of them struggling to study.

[brother]

what is really going on?

[John Dinga]

Something is fundamentally wrong when extracurricular activities trump academics for which students and parents spent energy and time and money to go after. Simplistic answers like Northwesterners coming to Buea to "destroy our institution of higher learning" is an easy armchair critic's solution to it but such as tenuous proposition is easily tossed out of the window when seen in the context of other institutions in the same vicinity carrying on serenely, dutifully and successfully, their northwest "gents provocateurs" notwithstanding.

Anybody who has ever invested in academics wants success and would do anything under the skies to make it happen. On the other hand, someone with little commitment to the cause, stands a better chance of being disruptive and counterproductive to such efforts. And so we take a step or two back in time to see who would come all the way to UB , yet show so little commitment to its ideals.
How are students selected into the institution? Is it all based on merit? Should one not tentatively finger those students parachuted into campus through patronage, those students who did not even take the competitive entrance examination or meet the necessary entry requirements? Is that not the category very likely to be classified as "nothing to lose" and therefore at the forefront of those intractable, disruptive skirmishes?

Do Cameroonians need a Freudian or a Sherlockian brain to determine that those with very poor outlook for the future would feature prominently in trouble making? A semester full of absenteeisms can hardly be made up by medical certificates concocted to justify the absences and demand resit examinations. A good semester is crowned by a student report showing participation in theoretical and practical work on Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, material ready to be taken out to the world in search of employment.

Most modern employers now introduce job interviews as a screening tool. A good employer can peer through a prospective candidate the way X-rays see through bony tissues or MRIs the soft ones. So what good is a Bachelor's degree, a Master's or even a Doctorate that cannot help the candidate scale this very first hurdle? And even if by some miracle, such a student were employed and put on the job, how many miles down the road will it take to come to terms with his/her inability to deliver the goods? How many passengers will want to go up in an aircraft piloted by someone with such a dubious background? Should a doctor with fake diplomas be entrusted with the lives of hard-working citizens?
Why would a sane employer recruit a manifestly problematic new hire into a business that calls for attention to fine details? Do people consider the outcome of an academic career punctuated by a plethora of unexplained absences?

[Dr. Peter Vakunta]

"The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit" --Chinua Achebe.

The folks at the helm at UB should read and re-read this aphorism by Africa's wise-man.This will galvanize them to throw off the blinkers from your eyes.

[Zam]

Those hooligans should be brought to book with immediate effect...

[Tata]

What was the goal of this riot? and what triggered it?