On Youth and the Persistence of Patronage
This piece interrogates the assumption that generational change alone will solve Cameroon's structural problems, using a personal anecdote to argue that favoritism and patronage span all ages, not just an older generation. The writer contends that meritocracy cannot take root until the mentality that privileges kinship and loyalty over competence is genuinely abandoned.
Sadly Cameroon is not changing anytime soon. We the youths always feel that in some way we have the solutions to the problems that plague this country and I have heard the sentence “ Le pays n’avance pas par ce que la jeunesse n’est pas inclue dans le processus de prise de decision” so many times that there was a time I really believed it. But now I know that the things that can bring change down here are totally independent of age and education.
One of Cameroon’s greatest problems has always been favoritism. The thing is a real cankerworm which has systematically eaten its way into every nook and cranny of the typical Cameroonian’s mentality, it is so terrible a vice that it has been broken down into other sub-vices such as nepotism, tribalism and others. And while we might want to tell ourselves that it is only practiced by the older persons we wouldn’t be practicing honesty.
My class ex-students’ group is a melting pot of all sort of characters ranging from amazingly smart to extraordinarily mentally challenged, passing through highly hypocritical to super-empathic, thus, that turns out to be where I get the most perspective. In one of our arguments, a complaint was made about those ex-classmates who never participate in any group conversation. I insisted no one is bound by anything to belong to that group, not to talk of being compelled to participate in any discussions given that we are just people who at some point in time passed the entrance exam into some school and our parents decided to pay fees in the said school and as such everyone should choose at his discretion whether or not he wants to belong to any ex-students’ group or participate in its discussions and his decision should not be contested by another person.
After saying what I said, I received a very long lecture on how we are a family and bla bla bla and ordinarily this should be kind of a good thing but my sensitivity was struck when the family lecturer-in-chief said and I quote “If I am president one day, who do you think my government will be filled with? SOBAns?” I was taken aback for like 10seconds before deciding that that particular question did not deserve a reaction from me, then it dawned on me that this just came from a “leader of tomorrow” and he clearly defined his criteria for selection if he had to be in position to delegate responsibilities. He will just choose from ex-students’ of his secondary school because they are his “family”.
It is such thinking that greatly slows down growth in Cameroon. The mentality that puts family loyalty, “contri-manship”, friendship and all other ships ahead of meritocracy is probably the mother of all vices that choke growth in this country. And contrary to popular belief it is not uniquely peculiar to the older generations but spans across every age group, touching even those who by virtue of the quality of their education and exposure should be free of such distasteful disposition.
Well, with the prevalence of this killer mentality it is very difficult to perceive any hope for the future. The virus that killed the Cameroon of the past, that is killing the Cameroon of the present, has already comfortably implanted itself in the Cameroon of the future. It is therefore safe to say that we haven’t finished suffering from the ravages of favouratism in Cameroon yet!
So why am I writing this?
With changing times, the over-availability of information and the craving by many people to impact their societies, the probabilities for smart people to meet and collaborate with each other to produce real results has significantly increase, thus, we can hope that slowly the love for work well done will replace the love for work done by family and friends, so that one day meritocracy might eventually walk the corridors of Cameroonian authority.
- Emmanuel Asafor
Written in 2019, this reflects a period of growing youth discourse in Cameroon about political inclusion and generational leadership, even as patronage networks remained visible across institutions. The piece speaks to a tension many societies face: the gap between rhetorical calls for youth empowerment and the persistence of informal power structures that younger cohorts inherit and often reproduce.
Then, it offered a sober corrective to easy narratives about youth as inherent agents of change—a timely reminder amid optimistic generational rhetoric. Now, it remains vital precisely because such patronage systems have not substantially weakened; the piece's central claim about the portability of vice across age cohorts continues to challenge comforting assumptions about demographic turnover as a substitute for genuine institutional reform.