Open letter to H.E. Okala Bilaï, colonial governor of the South West region 3

Your Excellency, it is with regrets that I write to your office at this crucial moment of your colonial occupational rule. Sir, after listening to you this evening (Friday 6th January 2017) over CRTV, I heard you saying “Teachers who will not return to school will have their salaries suspended.” Most of these teachers you are talking about don’t even have a service number yet. And those who got the service number are not different from the thousands of job seekers parading our streets on a daily basis.

These teachers work for close to four years or more before the said salary is made available. moreover, the machinery put in place by your hierarchy in “La République” has made it difficult for teachers to earn what you call salary. How on earth do you create a system that warrants a teacher to give away 20% or more of his or her pay package to an agent before he or she can seemingly boast of having his or her name on the list of those programmed to collect their salaries? Should you take it back, it makes no difference. I wonder whether that salary is the raison d’être of your behavior towards us.

If you are paying us so as to deal with us the way you have been doing in the past and even up-to-date, then you had better done what you have promised. By the way, which salary are you talking about? Is it commensurate to the job teachers do every day? How much is the salary and what is the work load of the teachers you are threatening? Our Fons and Chiefs rejected 50 million from your hierarchy. Our university students waved at the meager 50 thousand francs you people wanted to buy their consciences with. Gone are those days! Money is not our interest! FEDERALISM OR INDEPENDENCE is what we stand for. No amount of money can purchase our freedom!

We have suffered a lot under your colonial administration. No degree of threats can repel us from our target. It is time we stand for what we believe in and hope for. “He who refuses to fight today, will live to fight for ever.” ALUTA CONTINUA.