I am a big fan of Hamburgers, I owe my love for the American snack to my somewhat exaggerated consumption of American media and as such I always find myself dreaming of having a bite at a good burger from one of those fast food joints I see everywhere in ads and movies. I see myself taking a Big Mac down one bite after the other and voraciously downing a cold bottle of diet coke. For the most part, it was only a dream because here in Cameroon there is no McDonald, Subway or Burger King I could go into or drive through.
If you are in Yaounde, you probably know there are a couple of places where you can get a burger but I’ve always had a feeling the people in America have some secret sauce. Most of the burgers I have tasted here just seemed to be lacking something and I am saying this not because I have tasted American burgers anywhere but just because I never seemed to be enjoying one the way I saw those people in the ads do. Well, that has since changed.
This is not just an article about burgers so let be talk a little bit about entrepreneurship which is what actually brought us to this recountal of my lust for burgers.
It is common knowledge that no government has successfully built a strong economy on its own. That behind every vibrant economy you know there are some people whose works act as the backbone of that economy; the entrepreneurs whose role in the economic growth of any community cannot be overstated. To put the importance of entrepreneurs in perspective, data shows that 6% of United States private companies contribute 50% of the entire wealth of the country as per a USA Today March 2016 report. This will mean that 50% of the money in government coffers used to subsidize healthcare , pay of civil servants, and other state expenditure comes from just 6% of all the private companies in the USA. I imagine what will become of the American economy if those companies that make the 6% were to go out of business.
We all know just how difficult setting up and running a business is in Cameroon. The process of setting up a business in Cameroon remains confidential information despite the many times we have heard that work is being done on making it easier. We are currently working with other entrepreneurs who have had to go through the process of creating a legal business in Cameroon so we can come up with a guide that reflects reality to the closest degree possible.
Add the political setbacks to the cultural dynamics that still put degrees over everything and you begin to see why we have to celebrate and support our entrepreneurs, all in hopes that they do not become more focused on enjoying the celebrity that comes with entrepreneurship these days and lose sight of the greater purpose here which is to build a robust economy which will life other and in the process also make them bigger. We all know it is in our DNA to prefer having big while the rest have small, rather than having bigger for the rest to have big.
So back to my love affair with burgers.
Did I already mention I am a big fan of Burgers? I probably did but you should also know any person who considers himself a close friend knows that I have a thing for that sandwich. It is therefore no surprise that if there is a new burger joint in town, I’m like to get that information real quick. Sometime in July, I got wind of a new spot that was opening and I just had to be there on the opening day. Of course, I had some friends come with me because I think everybody is supposed to love burgers.
The first thing that struck me was the name- “SNAPBURGER.” SNAPBURGER -Snapchat; you know the rest of the story. The joint is located at Montee Cradat, Yaounde a couple of minutes walk from the famous Cite Universitaire at Ngoa-Ekelle. What those who are not familiar with Yaounde should know is that this area comprises mostly of students of the University of Yaounde 1 and as such the purchasing power there is not very impressive but yet these guys decided to establish here, my reflex was to ask the friend with whom I was standing “why di mendem no do this thing for Bastos ehh”, after all everyone in Yaounde knows that neighborhood as the area with all the good things money can buy. You can guess I was asking that question because the spot looks kind of exotic compared to what we have become accustomed to in that area. Before asking more questions, we treated ourselves to some Burgers which are unarguably the best I’ve had since birth. We got to top that with some cocktails; the type where you bring your friends to taste just so they can henceforth refer to you as the plug.
After eating these burgers and making a lot of noise given that I happened to have met a lot of people that I know, I got home and started thinking, who could these guys possibly be? I know from interactions with people that those above 50 in this country cannot think up something like that. The environment is oddly welcoming. The guys emphasize on details, such that the place looks like one of those fast foods you see in those movies and that immediately gives you an impression of déjà vu in a positive way, you automatically feel at home. With this keen emphasis on details to make it look like what I read on their menu “les burgers Americain fait a la Camerouniase” I just understood that there must be a youngster in the whole thing. And as such I just had to dig into who is or are the brains behind this whole thing, I mean, who does not like taking himself for Sherlock Holmes once in a while.
What were you doing at 18, what of 19? Well, we all were surely doing either freshman year or grappling with A levels somewhere. Well that’s the respective ages of the two founders of SNAPBURGER. Ngum Fai Yengo Bryan and Chabeja Randalls Ndobegang, both are students of Soa doing their second year of study, one in Law and the other in Economics, talking to them is one of the easiest things you will ever be given to do. They confess to be motivated by nothing other than insufficiency and an incessant desire to do something out of the norm, which immediately explained the location and the name. They also took inspiration from some characters of some movies such as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street; I can still hear Randall quote Jordan Belfort saying “People don’t know what they want until you give it to them”. I imagine that it is things like this that gave them the courage to establish something which is quite unseen in Cameroon.
In fact, I was so impressed that I asked about how they got funding for the establishment and they revealed all was possible through the power of saving. This is where my hair stood on end! These guys are basically teenagers and yet they saved capital to start a fast food, carefully putting money away for two years. I immediately started feeling bad because my poultry project has been lying in my dairy for almost three years and it seems like it will be lying there a little longer... But anyways, I was awestruck by discipline they practice and it occurred to me that they were no ordinary youths. Definitely they represent what youths who intend to delve into entrepreneurship have to be in order to lead any project to completion.
- Emmanuel Asafor