NASLA Graduates Issue SOS: Appeal For Presidential Intervention To Get Councils Recruit Them

Six years after President Paul Biya promulgated the landmark December 2019 General Code of Regional and Local Authorities (GCRLA), a severe institutional paradox is threatening to derail Cameroon’s decentralization agenda. While Regional and Local Authorities (RLAs) nationwide struggle with a chronic deficit of qualified personnel to manage transferred competencies, hundreds of highly trained technocrats from the National School of Local Administration, NASLA in Buea are left on the sidelines. 
In an appeal to the Head of State, His Excellency President Paul Biya signed by three representatives of NASLA graduates, Roy Boa Achingale, Jacques Valdes Feupeusi Kamguia, and Tansa Ngwanyi, they are calling for immediate State intervention to bridge the gap between policy aspiration and institutional reality. By putting in place the legal framework for local governments to absorb them after graduation.

Appeal For Presidential Intervention
Recognizing entrenched political resistance within local fiefdoms, the appeal emphasizes that legislative reform alone may not suffice. It calls directly upon President Paul Biya to issue a presidential decree granting a Special Status for NASLA graduates.
This proposed Special Status aims to accomplish three main objectives: Secure career trajectories by insulating local civil servants from the political arbitrariness of changing municipal leadership.
Establishing salary scales and benefits commensurate with their technical expertise to retain talent in remote and underserved territories. And mandating national posting or secondment mechanisms to ensure all Regional and Local Authorities benefit from NASLA’s administrative engineering.

Investment Left To Languish
The transformation of the former Local Government Training Centre, CEFAM into NASLA was designed to break local governance free from amateurism. Combining rigorous academic training in local finance, regional planning, project management, and administrative litigation with civic and military discipline, NASLA graduates were intended to form the professional backbone of a decentralized Cameroon.
Instead, early cohorts face bureaucratic inertia. Lacking an automatic posting framework or a binding integration mechanism, many of these state-trained professionals are currently technically unemployed. Relegated to menial tasks, or completely bypassed by municipal executives.

Patronage Versus Professionalism
The appeal highlights a deep-seated crisis within municipal human resource management, where key technical positions - such as Secretariat General, Directorates of Financial Affairs, Technical Services, and Municipal Treasuries - are not often occupied qualified personnel. According to the signatories, this has led to predictable and costly consequences: Such as administrative paralysis across numerous local councils; financial malpractices and poorly executed budgets. And substandard public services that fail to reach ordinary citizens.
To counter this, the authors urge Parliament and the Ministry of Decentralization and Local Development, MINDDEVEL to introduce binding legal safeguards. They argue that high-technical municipal positions must be reserved primarily, and in critical cases exclusively, for State-trained professionals like NASLA graduates.

Don’t Leave Them Out!
The appeal concludes with a stark reminder: continuing to exclude these trained architects of decentralization is akin to "attempting construction without foundations." For Cameroon to achieve economic emergence and territorial equity, the massive, legally framed, and statutorily protected integration of NASLA graduates must transition from a policy debate into a ...