You are one of those spearheading the way forward for
Cameroon in the private sector. As a sector which will determine the future of
this country how do you evaluate the pace of movement there?
One
big Cameroonian mistake is the thought that for a country to survive everybody
had to be in the civil service. Everybody had to have a white collar job. Everybody’s
supposed to have a title. I am the Director of this or that. We only want to be
at a point where we dish out instructions and not take them even if we
sometimes don’t know the instructions we are giving. Not everybody can give
instructions and if we keep giving instructions to each other, the productive
arm of the country is left unattended to. If you go to much more evolved
countries, such as Germany or the U.S., it is the private sector that dictates
the pace. If we don’t follow suite, then we are wasting our time. Life in any
country is about the private sector and we are saying that the Government
should provide a gust of oxygen to the sector so that they can go faster than
what is happening now. There are ways and means of giving that oxygen. All the
kids who now go to the University should have in mind that there is no work in
the civil service. The Cameroon civil service has about 230.000 employees.
Recently they dug out ten thousand fake employees. Now the population of
Cameroon is about twenty or twenty two million people. What is 230.000 compared
to 22.000.000 FCFA. There are millions of people out there who are neither
youths nor civil servants. The question is, who are these people and how do
they survive? This shows that we have to work a lot in the private sector. It
is the private sector that employs and it is the private sector that generates
the income. It is through the private sector that development comes.
What do you say about the timid response of English speaking
Cameroonians to specialized professional training?
If
Saint Louis were a Government run institution, you would have given your normal
excuse of Anglophone victimization. We only use this excuse to run away from
our responsibilities. We must rise up to the occasion. It is true that in some
schools there is some favoritism but every situation should not be pegged to
it. In a school like Saint Louis University in Bamenda with 1300 students more
than 700 of them are Bamelikes from
the West Region. You should note that the learning and teaching is in English
and the examinations are in English. The advertisements of the school are in
English and you don’t need to write a competitive exam to come to the school.
In 2013, something happened here that shocked me. There was this class of
students graduating from dentistry. In that class, there were 36 of them and 34
of the students were Bamelikes and
only two Anglophones. Nothing ever shocked me more than this. The Bamelikes are like the three wise men
from the East and despite the distance and the difficulties they understand
what they have to gain from it. The Anglophones are much more like the people
of Nazareth who could not really see the wonderful thing that was just below
their nostrils. When they are talking about problem I accept that there is the
Anglophone problem but Anglophones themselves contribute enormously to that
problem by refusing to do their own part. The quality of our students with A
Levels is very poor sometimes because of the very poor teaching and we are the
same ones who complain that students with two GCE A level papers should be
admitted into the university.
Yes but what is the origin of this poor response and lack of
awareness on the importance of professional training?
We
have this notion that if our children are not doing well we should send them to
teachers’ training colleges or to schools of nursing. We have a wrong
impression of things. We need to sit down and do a rethink because we are
backing the wrong horse and blaming someone else. In the 25000 jobs that were
provided, if they statistically divided these jobs per Region Anglophones will
have about 4000 or 5000 of them but because of the fact that the leaning was
mainly on technology, Anglophones had very few of these jobs. As I speak to you, many of those twenty five
thousand job opportunities have not yet been taken up because there were no
technicians in Cameroon fit enough to take those jobs because of the nature of
our training. We have jobs but our youths on the streets aren’t qualified to
take them. We are Anglophones and we run away from French but let’s see what
happened last year with the English Language score. They scored only twenty
three percent at the Ordinary Level GCE. So what has happened to your being Anglophones
when you can’t even pass the English Language? Something is seriously wrong
with us. Francophones come into our schools and top the charts and they top the
GCE so something is wrong with us.
What do you think is the way forward?
There
is just one way which is that when you want to do something,do it well. What is
lacking from us is excellence. We don’t have excellent thoughts and we don’t do
things excellently. We don’t respect truth and merit. The world is competitive
so even if you can play your tricks in Cameroon by cheating and having your
certificates when you get to the US you cannot cheat.There you will be forced
to face the music. We have to start doing things following international
standards. As I speak to you, the Philippines send 7000 to 9000 nurses to
America, Canada and Germany every year. How many nurses does Cameroon send? Nothing.
Cameroonians should respect reality, truth and standards in all aspects of its
society. Look at the School of Agriculture at Nkolbissong in Yaounde. Since its
creation what has been done there? What has happened to the agriculture
officials that we have been training at Nkolbissong that we are still importing
rice and corn? It boils down to improper
training. We only fight to sit in offices and kill each other over posts. There
is something seriously wrong with our training in Cameroon. One week ago, a
girl came into my office and asked for a scholarship to study in my
institution. I told her that scholarships in my institution are given to
particular persons for particular reasons. I tried to give her an example that
I give scholarships to people from Donga-Mantung because I want to bring up the
place. I asked about the number of GCE A Level papers that she had and she said
she had two A Levels with three points. She said she was from Bambili.
Incidentally I asked her if she knew where Donga-Mantung was and to my surprise
she said no. She said she thought it was a village somewhere. In my effort to
situate Donga-Mantung I asked her if she knew the ring road and she said she
didn’t know what that meant. You can imagine my shock with that coming from an
arts student who had just passed the GCE A Levels. The greatest shock came when
she said she didn’t know what an atlas was. That’s to tell you the kind of
studies we have in Cameroon. Such a student will go to ENS and become a
teacher.
Continued from an earlier interview published before this one....
Interviewed by
Francis Ekongang Nzante Lenjo
edevnews.blogspot.com/Email: edevnewspaper@gmail.com/ francoeko@gmail/ Tel: +237696896001/ +237678401408/ +237661864369/ +237691755578
No comments:
Post a Comment