With serious economic, infrastructural and security challenges to contend with, Cameroonians no longer expect the scandalous and profligate posturing that dominated the country’s leadership in 2013.
By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai*
New Year Day is a day to rejoice and congratulate each other for witnessing another calendar year; and for many Cameroonians, it is a day to celebrate the hope that survival imposes on the country, even in an atmosphere of poverty and widespread lamentation. It is also a day to cast an introspective look into personal, corporate and national affairs in the year just gone by, to take stock and to chart a new course for the year ahead.This past year was strewn with many booby traps, both literally and metaphorically. On the whole, 2013 saw Cameroon developing into a nation in conflict with itself, a nation living in outright contradiction to its declared development objectives.
For the umpteenth time, Cameroonians have had, at the turn of each year, the assurances of thePresident that better times are at hand. For that many number of times, Cameroonians have ended up with shattered hopes, broken promises and failed commitments. From all indications, it would appear that Cameroonians have been swindled again by their own government. In fact, not only have situations not improved, they have actually deteriorated. Most of the promises made, if not all, have gone unfulfilled.The Biya regime continues to harvest corruption scandals, with half-hearted pursuit of high profile culprits of audacious corruption. Whichever way Cameroonians turn, they are confronted with the overarching presence of pervasive corruption and societal decay.
With serious economic, infrastructural and security challenges to contend with, the attention of the country’s leaders was in the course of the year 2013 often consumed by vaulting ambition, pursued with intricate permutations, manipulations and maneuvering. The Senate, Legislative and Municipal election saw a vicious, if not subtle hold-up of the electoral process whereby tired old men tottering on the borders of senile decay, were recycled with impunity!To add salt to an already festering injury, the youths were told to go and “wait for their turn.” This, indeed, is unacceptable. Even if the age of these gerontocrats is no problem, what about the age of their ideas?
What the country deserves at this critical point is a crop of leaders that are endowed with the gift of steady application, imbued with the ability to control events rather than drift with the tides, and who in range of vision and depth of conception, tower above their contemporaries. Cameroon needs leaders of iron resolve, indomitable courage and sharp intellect with acute and exceptional sense of history to lead the people out of the doldrums. Such people abound in their numbers in this country but are choked by warped and corrupt recruitment processes, the major albatross of the country. Something, afterall, is wrong with a process which makes a few persons, in certain offices, or with some dubious connections; see it as their exclusive right to nominate people for appointment to public offices.
As a New Year begins again, Cameroonian leaders must stop and think just where the country is headed. Does the experience of the last 30 years aggregate to development in a land so abundantly blessed but so deeply violated and desecrated? Pathological lust for power and greed for money have rendered purposeful leadership prostrate. It has become more and more apparent that the fortune of this country is confiscated by those concerned with maintaining and expanding their private economic and political estates, hence whichever way the dice falls, there is a sense of foreboding thatpeace will soon go into exile, and prosperity will be long in coming.
The colossal waste and looting in government makes it now obvious that Cameroon’s problem, truly, is not money but where to spend it.The families and cronies of public office holders have constituted themselves into patronage cartels at whose disposal alone the public treasuryis placed and they alone decide who gets what. Vanity, of course, rules and their lifestyle is so opulent and extravagant in ways that are highly offensive to public sensibility.Large-scale looting, misappropriation of public funds and sundry acts of impunity anda culture of waste has taken root, fuelling an unmanageable cost of governance and, consequently, poor service to the people.
It is so bad that, untested hands are appointed into sensitive public offices. The refrain is that the best of Cameroonians are outside the government. This tragedy is a vicious cycle: The collapse of businesses and poor economic environment due to poor political and economic decisions have made government and politics a major and most rewarding source of livelihood, the only thriving business, the surest way of climbing to the top with little or no sweat. Those who failed in business, in their education and some who at one time or the other, contributed to the economic downturn of the nation continue to be recycled in political offices giving them the opportunity to perpetuate their failure in the affairs of the nation. The result is what obtains today: widespread ineptitude in the body politic. No country, after all, can rise above the level of its workforce, especially at the decision-making or leadership level, hence the parlous state of the nation.
The slogan of Vision 2035 remains for many critical minds a huge joke, a wild and idle prediction of the place of Cameroon’s economy by year 2035 on the global scale. The country’s path to greatness will be defined by the choices it makes today. Those who have had the primary responsibility to lead this country to greatness have often paid lip service to a nation; one, united and indivisible. Cameroon is nowhere near its potential; rather, it is a jungle to be plundered and violated with impunity.The bigger picture of the Cameroonian national mosaic demands the undivided attention of leaders who, of their own choosing, have come forward to govern. That mosaic must encompass the multi-dimensions of nation-building - education, healthcare, the economy, security, social services. These must be pursued simultaneously in an environment of social justice and equity, and it is what democracy is all about. Where any aspect is left unattended, development becomes stunted. We cannot claim to develop when access to jobs is effectively closed to the teeming products of the education system. We cannot develop when leaders go abroad for painkillers and surgery, rather than build functional health facilities at home.
As Cameroonians enter a New Year, they expect of their leaders a change of heart, a resolve to put in hard work in legislation, planning, execution and oversight and accountability. What Cameroonians no longer expect is the scandalous and profligate posturing that dominates the country’s leadership today.Without the hope of a better tomorrow, life would be sterile. The experiences of 2013 serve as a reminder that justice as a primary condition of human existence remains a critical undercurrent of the nation’s travails. Cameroonians can only continue to embrace the peace, which the President often talks about so thoughtlessly, in an environment of justice and equity. They have no other country but this one to call their own. If so-called leaders aspire for peace and development, they must embrace justice. The country’s leaders must renew their pledge to diligently assume a leadership anchored on integrity, principles and exemplary self-sacrifice. Cameroon will stand or fall on account of how it tackles corruption. On this note, I wish all Cameroonians a Happy New Year!
*Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai is a Public Intellectual and graduate of Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was Managing Editor of the Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy. A former Research Analyst for Freedom House, he is a Consultant and lives in Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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