Princely Kesah, Cameroon.
Persons with disabilities in Africa battle for inclusion in leadership at every given level of human development. Anyone of us who is successful is a fighter from birth. My experience as a leader of disabled persons gives me much to share with the international community on the world day of persons with disabilities observed every December 3. Focus this year is “Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities for an inclusive and sustainable future”.
At the most basic unit of society, the family, the battle in most cases for disabled persons is having enough to eat so as to have energy to sustain the life-long fight for inclusion. I discovered while growing up that little food was served me on most occasions compared to my non-disabled peers in different homes. I encountered such treatments many times both from family members and family friends. Investing in disabled children is rather a luxury for most parents who consider us as people with nothing to offer, hence, we are labelled a liability. Such injustice which begins right from our own families soon spreads to the communities and our fight for inclusion gets tougher after each step of the journey.
Apart from the family where we often have a push-back convincing our siblings that we are not less human, the church is the next on my list. Africans spend much time in church where they do not only pray but socialise quite a lot. The first visa to interact with non-family members is always the church, irrespective of religion. For me, I am a roman Catholic and felt the church would get me relieved of family inequalities. Anyone who thinks same is wrong. Many times, me and my peers were denied access to play church instruments because we are blind. They often judged us at first side on basis of our visual impairment. I also recall how much we had to fight to be given access to take Sunday readings in Church in different parishes and mission stations. Instead of helping us grow in leadership, you would think the church is rather a huge source of discouragement because fellow Christians hardly treat us like humans created in the image and likeness of God.
Another community avenue I thought we would explore to amplify our voices was school, and well, that is for a few of us fortunate to access formal education in Africa. Only one out of about ten children with disabilities access elementary education in the continent according to a 2018 World Bank study, and the higher one goes, so does the number drop. For instance, only four out of the ten end up attending secondary education. A bitter truth I got to notice while in school was the anger my sighted classmates expressed each time I came over all best in exams. Stories of having favours from teachers were told so many times as most of them concluded a blind man could never perform better than them. This was a stiff mountain I was prepared to ascend almost every year.
My biggest shock in school came in 2015 when I filed in an application to run for the office of Senior Prefect of Government Bilingual High School Bamenda, an academic institution in Cameroon’s Northwest region hosting five thousand students at the time. Given that the Senior Prefect and the rest of the student government is normally elected, I did not quite understand why the school hierarchy summoned me many times to question my candidature. It seemed rather a mystery to most of them how a blind student would lead five thousand others for the first time since creation of the school in 1978. Well, I insisted to the Vice Principal in charge of Prefects that if the students voted me, then, there was no need thinking if I was qualified or not. In fact, my application was previously rejected and I was advised to apply for a more inferior position but I stood my grounds to fight, knowing that resigning meant living to fight again another day. In the end, I had a land-slide victory and living a good legacy was what I worked on for over 12 months, and no doubt my immediate successor was another student with visual impairment, Zacharia Egbe, now a government high school teacher in Bamenda.
The biggest challenge I faced which you should surely be interested to know how I eventually found a solution was to convince the Principal to allow me organise socials for the students. The annual event had been banned two years before my government took over because vandalising school property during socials had become recurrent. The principal, Peter Suh Tangie wandered how a blind man would do what many sighted people failed to do many times. However, I was poised to do what probably the great Napoleon left undone. Even after the school administrator finally yielded to my plan, he gave me very little financial resources compared to what those before me had. To him, the package would discourage the holding of the event. Instead it became a springboard to me and my two social prefects. I quickly suggested a resource mobilisation plan and once all was said, I dropped a security plan which I guess left even the principle amazed till date as he enjoys a well deserved retirement following over 30 years of active service to his country. Am sure you too are eager to know the nature and amount of success recorded by my security tactic.
As the father of logic, Aristotle said many times, “man is a political animal” and I’mm not sure this excludes persons with disabilities like myself because like Rene Descartes’ “Meditations” I think, therefore I exist. What you have been awaiting is finally here. I asked my 19 prefects to give me a list of all the students they thought could cause chaos in the event. About twelve names were submitted with one name appearing on virtually all the lists. I appointed the guy who was about 2.5 metre tall head of security, asking him to collect a hundred francs as gate fee from each participant. For the rest, I offered them the chance to each invite a friend if they wanted, also providing free entry tickets. Please don’t ask me where the money collected for gate fee went to because I would honestly not be able to tell you. What I can say with certitude is that no single school property was vandalised that day. After my graduation in June 2016, the school administration invited me months later, formally recognising my service to the institution with the best prefect of the year award.
These are just a few out of a myriad experiences I have had and the intention of sharing them with you is to build the foundation to support the arguments in this article. The choice of the theme for this year’s international day of persons with disabilities is one we have been expecting for quite some time now. The barriers precluding the active involvement of disabled Africans in leadership are so real and destructive to disability inclusion in the continent. Discrimination, stigmatisation, the lack of assistive technologies, illiteracy and lack of political will are few of the problems impeding our progress in leadership. The continent counts over 80 million disabled persons, a majority of who are young people. My crusade is inspired by the idea that the cost of exclusion supersedes that of inclusion. If you doubt me, then, consider the example of a man who constructs a three-floor building while in his twenties without making the building accessible. When he is 80 years, he surely needs to redesign the house to make it accommodative to him because he is no longer able to ascend the stairs. What if the building had been made accessible when it was freshly constructed?
I noticed that most disabled persons in Africa hardly have access to leadership opportunities partly because of delays in education. IN 2022, I had the opportunity to coordinate the TamTam leadership development program, a one-year long project sponsored by the United State Embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon to train and equip 140 youth with disabilities in the country on leadership skills, exposing them to resources and opportunities for continuous development. The age range to participate in the project was 18 to 25 years. We had difficulties having university students within the age limit and had to get permission from the funder to extend the limit to 30 years. You can read our scholarly article about the project and how delays in education reduce leadership opportunities for youth with disabilities here.
Now that the international community is taking interest in promoting inclusive and sustainable leadership, I strongly feel that the TamTam leadership development program should be scaled across the continent. This would not only introduce youth with disabilities to engage in, and lead in their communities, they would equally learn how to leverage inclusive digital technologies to champion productive and sustainable leadership. Once independent living and community support are achieved in Africa, many more leaders with disabilities would emerge. The next ten years would serve as the framework building period while the rest of the future would be harvesting time. Let the ground be levelled, and we would compete to lead at any level.
Happy International Day of Persons with Disabilities to all Persons with disabilities in Africa.