The Cameroon Embassy in Washington D.C is a Repeat offender

ByJackson Nanje

A Bakossi native screams, “Mballe Dieu (God help me),” of his frustrating experience during a visit at the Cameroon embassy in Washington DC for some official business. He continues, “if you were trying to avoid having High Blood Pressure, you should avoid going to the Cameroon embassy in Washington D.C to do any official business there. “That, you have some of the worst species of human beings working there, he added.” I have heard countless and familiar stories from Cameroonians, who have expressed their displeasures on their frustrating encounters and debilitating blow backs received from staff workers at the Cameroon embassy. I am not sure what else Cameroonians living in the United States and the US Virgin Islands can do again to correct the issues of the Cameroon Embassy in Washington DC, to make things right. It appears the workers take great pleasure to offend and to bring out the worst in Cameroonians.

               Why do I think the Cameroon Embassy in Washington DC is a repeat offender?

Prior to my intervention in April of 2013 to which I wrote this scathing article in the link below,  https://nanjecreativethinking.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-cameroon-embassy-in-washington-dc.html chronicling the problems that Cameroonians often encounter when they visit their embassy in Washington DC the then ambassador, His Excellency, Joseph Bienvenue Charles Atangana Foe, took some precise corrective measures  to resolve most of the issues I cited in the article. The responses from Cameroonians across the United States of America after his intervention were overwhelmingly positive and that prompted me to write another article in April of the following year due to the urge of some of the embassy staff, congratulating the ambassador and his staff for a timely intervention in correcting most of the problems. Click and read the article in the link below to experience the excitement and gratitude expressed by Cameroonians after the ambassador’s intervention. https://nanjecreativethinking.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-cameroon-embassy-in-washington-dc.html

Obviously, the first article did rattle the embassy staff because when I visited the embassy a year after the article, I was given a tour of the facility and a visit with the ambassador who apparently told me that he did read my well-articulated article and even though he disagreed with some of the things I mentioned, he has however implemented a few of the things I cited in the article which were relevant to the smooth functioning of the embassy. He then asked me to write another article based on the changes they’d made which I observed. They had obtained the services of interns to facilitate the production of passports and visas and visa processing and delivery took less than a week to process far from a month it took in the past. Similarly, the visa fee, even though it is still significantly higher than what obtains in most African countries, it was reduced from $145.00 to $125.00 and subsequently to $93.00. Progress nonetheless! Cameroonians could still use some visa fees reduction or a complete elimination like it is in most African countries.

                       But what has gone wrong again at that same embassy in just a few years?

In order to get anything to work well anywhere in the world, there must be a System Dynamics in place. A System Dynamics or a System of Organization, which informs us where to put and where not to put things. It appears there’s no System of Organization in place at the embassy which, even with a change of ambassador, should not change the way things are being done at the embassy and for Cameroonians. If anything should change, it should rather ameliorate the old system. The previous ambassadors, Paul Pondi (was from Congo DR), Jerome Mendounga (was from Congo DR) and Atangana Foe (was from Calabar, Nigeria- Consular Officer) all arrived Washington DC (all from the President's tribe but for Pondi who was from Ngog Mapubi(of the Bassa tribe) in Eseka Sub division of the Nyong and Nkelle division) with questionable credentials. As a writer, I allocate the rights to myself to question impropriety when I see one; and this one is quite unbearable. The current ambassador, His Excellency, Henri Etoundi Essomba (also from the President's tribe), unlike his predecessors arrived in Washington DC with a stella career with tours in Belgium and Israel, where he spent a little over seventeen (17) years as a career diplomat something that has been lacking in his predecessors. He’s supposed to have been tested and proven competent to run an embassy as large as Washington DC. So, to see these old problems mentioned in the first link above to continue to reappear, one is forced to think that these ambassadors who are all from the President of the Republic’s tribe see themselves as untouchables or demi-gods, giving them unfathomable rights to abuse their clients.

To avoid sounding like a broken record I implore that the ambassador should read the first article above on the link and begin to address the afore-mentioned problems by putting in place:

a)      A robust and standardize system of accountability for staff members to abide by. This system should establish a stranglehold of all embassy staff under the auspices of the ambassador and not from the various ministries that sent them here.

b)    The ambassador should establish a Status or Customer Service Report System for the embassy’s departmental heads whereby, Cameroonians should appraise the health of the embassy vis- à-vis their relationship with its Cameroonian clientele.

c)     The government of Cameroon should conduct the hiring of the embassy’s essential workers from within the United States rather than from Cameroon for reason being that, the labor force in the United States is in tuned with the polite(refined) customer service culture and spare us of the rawness approach or primitive skills from Cameroon.

    After more than forty (40) years of the Beti-Ewondo tribesmen rule of the embassy of Cameroon, I think it is time for President Biya to try an English-speaking Cameroonian as ambassador at the Washington DC embassy. An Anglo-Saxon administrative style may just be the solution to the mediocrity we have come to know at our embassy.