There's an Anglophone problem in Cameroon but they themselves help to compound it- Dr.Nick Ngwanyam, CEO Saint Louis University, Bamenda

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

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"Garbage in Garbage out is a perfect description of Cameroon at the moment" - Dr. Nick Ngwanyam, CEO, Saint Louis University, Bamenda

Cameroon is in a Cull de Sac viewed from every perspective. As a very experienced personality in the health sector could you use your domain as a spring board to shed light on the reasons behind this situation?


 

Yes the bottom line is that we are not productive. There is a saying which states that you cannot give what you don’t have. If you pretend to give what you don’t have then you are a fake. Cameroon is not productive because she doesn’t know how to produce. It boils back to the educational system from where everything is learnt. The knowledge base we are having in Cameroon is not productive knowledge. It is a system based on what was put in place in 1960 which allowed us to communicate with the colonial masters. Other countries with which we started at the same time like South Korea went out for Engineering and Technology so as to enable them to be productive. This made it possible to add value to what they already had. In Cameroon young people who leave High School and even the university can neither write letters nor solve problems. They cannot think in the abstract or get things done because the education that has been put in place does not trigger meditation.

In practical terms, what obtains in the average Cameroonian campus?

Students simply read the teachers’ notes and regurgitate the notes after which they are given a degree with no element of research. They don’t go out for themselves to find out how things work. As a journalist you must know the key questions of where, when, why, who and how. In our universities, we simply provide answers to these questions. For instance, Who was the first President of Cameroon? When did Cameroon gain independence? If you study like this you can never produce results or yield fruits. Studies should trigger meditation. They should be capable of brainstorming and making things happen. Why is it that developed and shorter banana species produce more than the tall wild species that we have in our villages? What do Scientists do to come out with improved species that come out with greater yields? What happens to produce a change in colour from green to red in a tomato These are the kind of questions that our children should be asking. Brain tickling questions that push the machinery towards productivity. How can soap that is made from palm oil be used to remove palm oil stains from a shirt? Why is the road between Bafoussam and Bamenda in such a sorrowful stage? This question will take them to issues such as the life span of tar that is used on our roads and the effect of fires that was burnt on the tarr during political uprisings in our political history. Fire reduces the cohesive power of tar. Students should be capable of asking and having answers to the how and why of their daily lives.

Some think it is an attitude problem that presently disturbs Cameroon considering the fact that you have some very intelligent people in this country.

Cameroon might have some of the best minds. If you have Cameroonians who’ve studied out and returned home and copied what they have seen out as well as come home with the mind sets of the people where they studied then they will be as productive as any other creative set of people. But this is not dominantly the case. The thought process of the average Cameroonian is wrong and when this is the case, you will certainly produce something which is wrong. We’ve got more problems with our thought processes and if we don’t correct them, we will never get out of our limbo. So I think we have a problem of attitude. We don’t know that our attitudes have got to be right for us to succeed and we think that we can always fake it. We must come back to the truth as the bible says that the truth shall set you free. The truth here is not just about believing in God but the truth in every aspect of our lives. We must be principled and so if we go against principle, we will be punished for it. On this issue of principle God sends rain to the farms of both the believers and the non believers alike. Back to principle; if you follow the ordering of the seasons then you will benefit from the rain fall but if you don’t then the rains will be of no use to you irrespective of whether you are a believer or not. To follow the truth involves being principled and when we don’t we pay the price that Cameroon is paying at the moment.

What about the fact that deserving Cameroonians hardly ever get anything in return?

This brings us to merit which is still another aspect of truth. There is this thing called GIGO in computer language. Garbage in garbage out is the perfect description of Cameroon at the moment. When we do our competitive examinations to send students to CUSS, ENAM P and T and all sorts of schools, the question we should be asking is, are those the best students found in Cameroon? When we say that this year we have selected 150 students to enter CUSS are those the best 150 in the country? Of course no. We have other ways of selecting which do not represent the truth and that’s where the problem lies. It is all about working with the truth and respecting the truth. If this is done, 80% of the problems of Cameroon will be corrected. You see the child of a peasant who is very intelligent sees the doors shut onto him while the children of some well placed rich person who watch TV from the morning to the evening and who cannot even write their names take their places. The country is going to collapse if we keep on doing this.
I trained as a Medical Doctor in CUSS but because I also had an opportunity to be trained in Nairobi and in London and I have the opportunity of traveling I can tell you that our health services are not doing very well. I’m using the health services as an example since other sectors are the same. Something is wrong somewhere and until we lay our hands on what is actually wrong then we will be dancing in circles.
We have about 6000 Medical Doctors and professors in Cameroon. If we were to do an experiment and go to Boston University and bring a professor in Medicine from there to come and test our Doctors and professors the question is how many of us will pass that exam which is set following international standards? It’s a thousand dollar question. If health services in some countries in Western Europe are rated at 90% then what score will you give our health services? An honest answer to this question will reveal that even if we increase the number of medical doctors in Cameroon to 12000 a very little change in quality will be registered.

In specific terms what do you think South Korea, Singapore and Hongkong, countries with which we started out at the same time are doing that we are not?

They understood long ago that the key lies in proper education and also having the right attitude and character. These are things that we have neglected and we are going to pay dearly for them.

Are you also of the opinion that Colonial Masters contributed in the way Africa took off?

If I say yes, my answer will be 50% correct. Because if Colonial Masters are going away without showing you what to do to survive then it will take a long time for you to discover what it is that is important. They put us on the wrong track and we are studying the wrong things so that they could come back and continue to feed on us. Now that we have the means such as the internet from which to get the truth we should know what is important. We have our backs against the wall and we have to rethink our strategies real fast. It is time to export more than we import and to add value to our raw materials and create jobs for our youths.

Continued.......