Editorial: Fake certificates in military; Another crown of shame for Cameroon!.

The Minister Delegate at the Presidency in charge of Defense, Joseph Beti Assomo, in making the disclosure on Wednesday June 12, in a public statement, said the shocking detection followed part of the recruitment process for young Gendarmes and soldiers, for the 2024 budget year.

In-depth checks to authenticate the diplomas of candidates selected for the medical examination revealed the existence of numerous false certificates.

He classified them as follows: One fake GCE Advanced Level, 64 fake GCE Ordinary Levels, 12 false Probatories, 491 fake Cameroonian BEPC, 661 fake BEPCs from a neighbouring country and 83 false CAP certificates.

Judging by the two educational systems, the Anglo-Saxon system had just 65 fake certificates, while the Francophone model dominated with 1,148 dubious qualifications. No comment.

It is not the first time such a parade of infamy is uncovered in the recruitment of members of the defence and security forces of the country.

In August 2022, the Ministry of Defence dismissed 929 trainee soldiers, accused of having falsified their diplomas.

A visibly very irritated Minister Beti Assomo, had in a martial tone, declared that the Army and the Gendarmerie cannot admit cheats and forgers into their ranks.

“The investigators of tomorrow and the defenders of law and order cannot be, before entering the house, delinquents with false diplomas, while other young Cameroonians deserving and holders of authentic diplomas are left at the door, during competitions and recruitments. I say it bluntly, zero tolerance will be required in this matter," he had declared. 

Unlike the indignity of 2022, when the fraudsters had undergone some military training with the implications that they could convert into armed robbers and other heinous criminals, this year's crooks were still going through the rigorous scrutiny of recruitment.

It is not only among men in uniforms that fake certificates and other documents are common in Cameroon. 

Every year, fake diplomas are detected in both private and public companies. Falsified documents are submitted for admission into prestigious schools.

In 2019, the National Commission for the Evaluation of Certificates obtained abroad, detected 63 false diplomas, out of the 426 that were submitted.

The villain phenomenon is widespread in the country and no sector is spared. 

The Cameroon Development Corporation, CDC, for example, is known to have flushed out some employees, among them managers, with fake certificates, after they had been working with the corporation for several years.

Within the social security sector, there have been various cases of women who multiply the number of their non-existent children, to fraudulently collect benefits from the National Social Insurance Fund, CNPS.

There are also countless reports of people using fake documents to reap from a bleeding public service of ghost workers.

Countless cases exist where unscrupulous civil servants clone their birth certificates by chopping off several years so as to prolong their retirement. This is common with those who do not plan for life after retirement or consider retirement as a death sentence.

Limiting the employment age into the civil service at 34, is said to encourage falsification of birth certificates.

According to one warp argument to support the phenomenon. "I obtained the general education baccalaureate. I am currently 35 years old, so I am out of the running for recruitment into all public institutions. If I find an opportunity to get a fake baccalaureate, should I hesitate? What good have all these years spent on the way to school been for me?,” says an indignant man to a reporter in Yaounde, who maintained that the government should focus on the skills of individuals, and not their ages.

Shockingly, Cameroonians are also exporting their fake qualifications. 

Last year, the Cameroon Ambassador to Belgium noted that “some students continue to rely on intermediary crooks, five of whom were able to be identified by the University of Liège, which filed a complaint with the constitution of civil party against them".

The Cameroon government is not indifferent to the crown of shame that blight the image of the country abroad and at home.

In July last year, the Minister of Public Health, Dr Manaouda Malachie, and his peer of Public Service and Administrative Reforms, Joseph Le, co-chaired a session to discuss the process of digitalisation of administrative documents and certificates, through a platform for school management and electronic authentication.

It was disclosed that with the programme, 35,000 diplomas issued between 2017 and 2022, had been integrated into a database.

The platform is said to help identify fake diplomas. In principle, the institutions that train and deliver diplomas integrate and validate the results of the different exams in the database. 

With the computer application equipped with a Security Quick Response device, it is able to verify whether a diploma presented is authentic.

At The Guardian Post, we hold strongly that such an application should be established in the various education ministries and other organisations that issue all types of certificates to offer quick verification and pre-empt the humiliation fraudsters bring to the image of the country.

As deterrent measures, those who are caught with fake certificates should also be made to face the excruciating sword of justice.

We need not roll a crystal ball to point out that if the 929 military trainees caught with forged certificates in 2022, were brought to justice, it would have deterred the 1,312 others who have repeated the misdemeanour this year. 

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue No:3141 of Friday June 14, 2024