Mr Paul Biya and John Fru Ndi as Farmers in Defence of the Homeland
By
Ernest L. Molua
The progress and development of nation states has historically been defined by its people’s love for work, urge to overcome challenges and erudition for scholarship to gain new information to innovate the work they so much love to do. Paradoxically, the antidote for Africa and Cameroon’s stalled progress hinges on dislike for work and loathe for creative scholarship, two ingredients that have raised empires. No doubt therefore that economic progress has been slow and volatile, even with the abundance and periodic discovery of primary resources oil, timber and diamonds. A Cameroon state with stable macroeconomic environment that trades with its neighbours and the rest of the civilised world to generate much needed revenues to plough into development projects, will require more than strong institutions. It will also require effort that lures and trains the citizens on the virtues of work, scholarship and love for country.
Biya and Fru Ndi in unusual tango
When Mr John Fru Ndi again hit the front pages in the newsstand, this time with prime interview he accorded the Summit Magazine (Number 009: July – September, 2009), clutching a machete on the right hand and a bunch of African banana on his left shoulder, Cameroonians of all works of life rushed to newsstands, some purchasing copies of the magazine others conjuring the story to their colleagues.
Without exaggerating, edition No. 009 must have been the best-sell of the publishers of the people oriented-picture Summit magazine. In the depth of the interview at the centre of his farmstead, the chairman in Texan farm clothes whilst exhibiting the fruits of his labour had no kind words for the Cameroonian labourer and work habits.
Mr John Fru Ndi the farmer at the front page of a magazine is reminiscent to billboards countrywide, some fifteen years ago, of Cameroon’s enigmatic President Paul Biya in his family farm, harvesting a pineapple. And later on, television images of the Head of State, harvesting maize in his Mvomeka Farms. This coincidence of farmer-politicians and heads of leading political parties, clutching farm products, is more than that which meets the eye.
Mr Fru Ndi now as Mr Biya then, is not about who should win a farm contest in a radio ‘phone-in’ programme, but a remake of the time-honoured historic and evolutionary process that agriculture occupies in nurturing families, building communities and catalysing the industrialisation of nations from the fields of the sons of Abraham to the great wild-west of the new lands of the Americas, and from colonial settlers in Australasia to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. And in our own backyard in Southwestern Cameroon where the earliest colonists that set foot on our rich volcanic soil, had nothing else in mind other than to till the soil until they drop, toiled to establish plantations, built castles and railways and contributed revenues and taxes to their home treasuries.
Mr Fru Ndi now as Mr Biya few years back, tango in unison and lament on the inertia of the Cameroonian of working age. While the opposition kingpin laments on the dearth of farm labour Mr Biya bewails on general lack of initiative and creativity of the average Cameroonian. That Mr Fru Ndi even tries to undo the President in his lamentation on the absence of labour and neglect of younger Cameroonians to gainfully till the soil in his farm, is testament on the first evil that has befallen the Cameroon state: loathe and disutility for work and the urge to reap where one never sow by men and women of working age.
What is gleaned from these two elder statesmen in the depth of their farms, is not only a fusion of the ghosts of Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Kwame Nkrumah beckoning the people of Cameroon to rise up to the challenge and triumph over the disgrace that has befallen them within and outside the country, but possibly that Cameroon is paradise lost, thanks to the dislike for work, inertia and inaction of its working age group. The urge to reap where one never sow permeates all spheres of national life, and the sycophantic adherents and promoters of this model sit and dine day-to-day with the managers of government and politics. For Cameroon to proudly occupy a significant position among emerging economic well-to-do states, its rulers both in government and leading opposition parties must urgently begin the process to unearth and weed out those they work with whose actions are in variance to the objectives of nation building
Unearthing the Sycophants
It is an understatement that cowards of deceit plague and hover around the tables of leadership in both the Cameroon Peoples Democratic Movement (CPDM) and the Social Democratic Front (SDF), like kitchen sink bacteria waiting to devour not only the waste but also the fingers that feed them. When Mr John Fru Ndi, a modest bookseller, braced the power of the state to launch the SDF party, the elites cowed in absentia. Today, they plot and engage in running battles to unseat the Chairman from the party he took the risk to launch, for them it is now harvest time - where they never sow - and it costs less with zero risks or perhaps even more profitable now to be at the fore front. Recall that the peers of these turncoats-miscreants formed more than two-hundred moribund political parties, the nucleuses of which are still in their family bedrooms for almost twenty years now. This is a glaring indicator that they are up to no good and cannot achieve anything.
Mr Biya, on the other hand, has found himself enslaved in the midst of pretending sycophants that strangely he cannot do without within the CPDM party and government, who would say yes to a devil in the dead of night, yes to a priest early morning and yes to a mermaid at noon time, for power and access to the state treasury: apprentice sorcerers with inherent genetic attraction to looting and pilfering. These are well known persons in our communities, who go to work not to work, but for their own profit. They sign all the motions of support and pretentiously sit at the frontlines of public events, the only allegiance they pay to is the rumbling in their stomachs for replenishment – symptoms of the ‘culture-of-poverty’ which is a perennial halo to the unproductive Cameroonian elite. Their inefficiency and uselessness is exhibited not only by their fear to retire but also by their numbers that have been hired and fired by Mr Biya; men and women who come and go from government departments, ministries and state institutions living them as the colonialists left them.
These wait-and-grab parasitic elite - who never sow except bickering and back-biting -, within the opposition and ruling party and in-and-out of government, who contribute little or nothing to the state treasury and the overall developmental process except signing memos and pilfering; is the second evil that confronts the state of Cameroon. These class of persons are well equipped on methods and techniques to exploit other classes of society; thanks to the colonial education they received that deceives the school leaver that the more certificates you amass or learning years you put, the better positioned you are to inherit Cameroon even if you fold arms. Unfortunately, this paradigm which is still in place has turned out to be misleadingly untrue and its products too have all turned out rather to become grabbers as they do catch up. Other than re-engineer their fate on moral grounds as when they swear to holy books on taking offices, these parasites have merely cocooned and armoured with better techniques and methods to undo even the finest works of a team of CIA-MI6-Mozar security service. For their feisty grip on the nation state to be arrested, operation ‘sparrow-hawk’ will require better engines and a man-made Robin island prison – possibly the size of Australia – constructed off the coast of Idenau to accommodate the architects of the second evil.
Cameroon Diaspora unfit to wrestle its own conscience
Cameroon diaspora, with so much hope and promise, is sadly too a mirror image of the marauders at the home front. Unfit to wrestle with its conscience, this community postures to see everything wrong with the Cameroon state, blaming everyone else except themselves. Whether as sycophants in Cameroon or as economic migrants, the stakes of contemporary Cameroon has been reduced to jostling and meandering for opportunity to profit without sowing. Overwhelmingly, members of the diaspora community exploit the Cameroon drama for asylum gains, some evoking the mother of all illusions enshrined in secessionist myopia. The epitome is the current abuse, whether in French or in English, of cyberspace and the pages of waning local newspapers in lambasting the workings of the Cameroon state, by doomsday commentators.
Their comments seem to correlate the life of a nation state to their own biological clock. Since the Cameroon of today cannot feed their wishes, it is worthless. This thought constitutes evil and selfishness. Some even draw comparisons between Cameroon and states that have undergone more than three-hundred years of unimpeded refinements. Strangely, their comments mis-educate unsuspecting Africans into believing all is well across the globe except in Cameroon. Many people though are gullible to this deception.
It is even startling to read commentaries from deserters who are carried away with the trappings of the new society in which they live, themselves enslaved by the illusion of credit-card plastic-money, in lands with historic economic segregation and hardship, valley-wide racial disparities for which in any case people of African stock are repositories of the scars of historic violence on the black race. The real tragedy is however when deserters - themselves product of a system that loathes work and creativity - comment like faraway Cantonese who have no responsibility to the land of Cameroon. This is the fourth evil. That they fail to acknowledge a responsibility to toil for Cameroon highlights clearly a weakness in the civic lessons dispensed to young Cameroonians.
What Cameroon diasporan commentators of English and French expression fail to point out in their abhorrent rants, however, which is true is that though they have failed to gain knowledge on the successful workings of the communities they now live in and have failed to translate into positive contributions to their native lands like their Irish and Jewish emigrant peers; our country too like the faces of marginalised groups in the countries in which Cameroon diaspora reside, is a victim of centuries’ old systems and modern-day structures hatched in secret rooms from Bilderberg to Johannesburg and London to Rio de Janeiro, systems built to reap profit on the skulls-and-bones of some sections of the human race. The shackles of which can only be overcome through concerted efforts. Perhaps that is why the government of Cameroon in its wisdom sent its best brains on scholarship to western universities to decode the blueprints of development. Unable to value the very essence of their mission some of these prodigals are not only missing in action but some have now turned into obnoxious miscreants in cyberspace.
Africans mindful of all their shortcomings evidenced in weak ‘group dynamics,’ have easily fallen prey to the onslaught of more powerful organised profiteers, traditionally of Caucasian stock. Cameroon too is possibly at the mercy of such modern-day Masonic ubiquitous machinations aimed to serve the appetite of perpetual exploiters. This is another evil. Cameroon diaspora must become constructively useful and carve for themselves important roles as agents of positive change. Whether you decide to become useful by setting up a foundation or civic centre – which by the way are relatively easy to establish as Common Initiative or Economic Interest Group - the point is that this lot cannot afford to incessantly remain as obnoxious appendages to developmental efforts in Cameroon.
Reclaiming the Cameroon State
Whether it is the first, second, third or fourth evil, parasitic elite and deserters recoup short term gains, but the nation suffers in the interim. To dissect and extricate these evils and arrest any long-run damage, true energetic-omnipresent-patriots must devise means to reclaim the soul of the Cameroon state from the tentacles of the ever-present voracious parasitic elites on all fronts.
Whilst Cameroon is work in progress, the survival and development of the nation state in the next 30 years is paramount. The lessons from the farms of Mr Biya and Fru Ndi would not only live beyond these statesmen but are also instructive on the basic socioeconomic engineering required for new attempts to re-launch the development process. For the Cameroon of 2040 to be an upper middle income country, where its citizens would access better healthcare, creativity-enhanced-education and breath the culture of entrepreneurship in all spheres of civic life, a generation that loves work, which goes to work to work and puts country first must be nurtured.
The challenge on expanding the size of the proverbial cake, better preserving it from the smutty hands of elitist parasites, and finally improving the monitoring of its distribution back to the people, would require a social re-engineering that puts love for work and sacrifice primordial. Young Cameroonians must be taught the virtues of hard work, and Cameroon diaspora which has seen in firsthand how hard work breeds success in other societies despite any challenges that exist stand a better chance of using its resources - real and intangible - to inform and educate the people of Cameroon on nation building.
And when all is done, a significant proportion of the Cameroon cake must be returned to the actual bakers: the ordinary men and women (traders, drivers, cleaners, clerks, farmers, teachers, etc.) who traditionally replenish the state treasury by toiling under scotching tropical heat in Batibo and the flogging of rain drops in Yokadouma; from the shining sea at Limbe to the rising tops of Mount Kupe and the Kapsiki. But, this is no small task, for the people to do the preservation; monitoring and distribution could be recruited not on their ability to bake, but on their unproductive worthlessness in the class of the parasitic elite. This can be overcome, nonetheless, by ensuring the bakers themselves do the preservation, monitor and distribute. This will require an urgent re-engineering of both the country’s formal and informal educational systems. These systems would define both family and national successes. Cameroon could borrow the blue print from the Chinese cultural revolution of the 1960s. No matter the difficulties, the endpoint is checking unproductive elite parasitism and ensuring that the working men and women of Cameroon reap the actual reward of their efforts. Let a million flowers bloom...© The Entrepreneur Newspaper 2009. All Rights Reserved
Ernest L. Molua, PhD is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Entrepreneur Newsonline. He is a Lecturer, Researcher, Community organiser and Entrepreneur. He is currently a Senior African Visiting Fulbright Scholar & Research Affiliate at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. All views are the author’s alone. He could be reached at: emolua@gmx.net Tel: +1 240 486 2043
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