The freedom of association law of 1990 and other related laws that followed gave raise to an Association/NGO boom in Cameroon. If you want to call it a boom, then you better think again. I simply mean here that the registers at the DO and SDOs are experiencing a registration boom that is unfortunately not reflected in the number of active Associations/NGOs on the ground. If you are getting this mail, then it is either evident that your Association/NGO existed, exist or is about to start existing. Even up to this point, we still need to differentiate existence from being in action. Not even this writer can be made the judge to do this differentiation. Key questions and individual actions as you read this mail can start to differentiate between doom existence and purposeful existence. Eg when was the last time you spoke or wrote to someone about your organization’s unshakable position about some burning social, political, cultural, and economical and development issue in the life of this nation? When was the last time you got out of bed before day dawn to take notes about your thoughts on how this nation can be saved for posterity?
If each and every one of the over 55,000+ Associations and NGOs in Cameroon could say a phrase each time something happens OR an elected official takes a decision about the life of this nation, then we will have 55,000+ analytical ideas to put on such actions to give safeguards.
I refused to endorse the spirit that when an elected official takes a positive action, we say its but normal and his responsibility to do so. When he takes a bad decision we say he is irresponsible or simply grumble in the dark corners of our offices because we fear reprisal.
An active and responsible civil society will take a position whatever the decision or the outcome of the actions of our elected officials is. We must learn how to say “congratulations…But…” as well as should be able to say “ …we total disagree on xyz…So…”.
By analyzing a situation and saying what we think is our civic rights and clear sign of patriotism. Today I received a group of young Cameroonians in my office who complained bitterly about the recruitment procedure for the 25,000 “youths” into the public service. They think the shift of date is purely political and worried aloud if such recruitment will ever be effected. I looked at them with a lot of petty and interest and so took my time to explain:
- I refused their point of view that pushing the date to December was political. It seems to me and clear to my thinking that the reason is technical, financially logical and legally meaningful for a number of reasons:
- If it effectively took place in June, then a financially transparent and responsible government plus our MPs should have had to explain to Cameroonian where the money was by the time they adopted the budget for 2011
- Our government underestimated the level of unemployment in Cameroon and hopefully has learnt a lesson and has built good statistics from this.
- The government underestimated the level of corruption in Cameroon as evident from the already thousands of fraud cases among the applicants
- No government creates jobs by increasing the size of the public service which to my simple understanding of ABC of economics is a consuming service. Pick up your calculators and lets do a simple math:
- If the state effectively recruited 25,000 new workers by June 2011, and assuming an average salary of 100,000 FRS CFA/month, then the state would have needed to raise 15 billion to pay salaries for the last six months of 2011. Thank God the state managed to get out of that illegality by pushing the date to December
- Think carefully now. In December, the state will need 30 billion each year to pay salaries for the 25,000 workers (at an average of 100,000/worker/month). This puts the total budget burden to 150 billion within the next 5 years.
- If instead of employing 25,000 for the first year the state decided to finance these graduates at a start-up/Tax free sum of one million Francs CFA to start a business, then the 30 billion per years would have put a total of 30.000 youths in Business for the first year. Should each of these young aspiring Cameroonian business men/women employ one other Cameroonian, then 60,000 Cameroonians will be employed within the very first year of investing 30 billions.
- Let us project in five years; 60,000 x 5 = 300,000 Cameroonians employed within five years
- If our good government decides to start taxing these young businesses after five years at 2% รจ 2% x 150 billion = 3 billion/yearly recovered back into the state coffers. Call me a bad economist because I am missing some facts, but the truth is as above…
Warning: I have made a number of assumptions here.
1. those who get the money and fail to reach success levels cannot enter the public service
2. Those with marked success can get more government loans
3. Apart from those funded by such a program, the state may also review the Tax policy including the import/export licensing
4. Review Custom duties
5. move from political incrimination to visible anticorruption actions by Multiplying the current anticorruption campaign by 10-20 folds
6. Many programs have been put in place in line with this thinking someone will argue. I total agree, but what are the results, why are people not being brought to book for not delivering? Think about the national employment fund and you will develop heart attack, think about….
So what went wrong OR who never played their roles in designing our national policy on reducing unemployment?
Get ready: within the next few months, more bags of rice will fly around, bags of salt, cubs of soap, bottles of beers and in best cases a few thousand francs will fly around. This is how cheap Cameroonians have become in their own land, a land of plenty. GOD WHERE ARE YOU?
If you give me the chance to blame someone, I will blame myself and then my colleagues of the civil society for not being proactive enough. We are about 55,000 in the books but our voices seem too small to be heard. Thank God it’s getting bigger by the days.
When the African heads of states met, It meant nothing to me because it was the same old song that generated no echoes. But the lesson I learnt from them is that people of common interest must meet regularly to either make real impact or simply relax away from the heat of change in their respective countries and in our case as civil society from the heat of our inactions.
Based on this, I am beginning to think strongly that commissioning a yearly Cameroon civil society conference looks like an idea. Once a year we meet to take stock of the life of the nation and feed-in to government actions and make sure we are fully aware of the direction of the tides before they sweep us unaware.
The Cameroon Civil society Yearly conference should have as objective to share lessons, learn, showcase, network and grow as a constructive voice to be respected. It should bring together individual organizations and networks; it should help define how we are seen by the state and by the partners. We must move fast from the position of donor/recipients concept to a partnership concept where our role is seen as vital to the continuous existence of organizations/governments in the North just as theirs is to our existence in the South. North-South partnerships should be seen as strong as our south-south partnerships. We must move our nations from the current artificial positions of heavily indebted poor countries to that of independent African nations in its truest sense.
If you disagree or agrees, let me know your own point of view, this is where we talk of freedom of expression, democracy and the respect of fundamental human rights.
Stay Blessed
Christian
