The Youth as Architects of Economic Change in Cameroon

Change is so far the only thing on earth which has successfully imposed its eminence. Humanity is constantly on its way to a different stage or path. No matter how much consideration or disdain given any situation, life always finds a way to wade it off.

Rarely is there any situation that endures for eternity. Credit this to fate or cast it off as mere serependity, the fact remains that change is and will forever remain constant. But change does not provoke itself, especially positive change.

Time is believed to heal all wounds but sometimes all she does is aggravate them turning them into terrible, unbearable pain. Positive change therefore, can only be attained by concerted action, by daring to oppose what is not right and taking stands to right these plaguing wrongs.

Cameroon today finds itself in every quagmire there is, be it financial, economic, social, political and any other available. The country has been crippled to near nothingness by poor administration, misplaced priorities and sheer lack of interest in the states affairs by her citizens.

Cameroon, as it is, has been ranked quite often on the list of poor and heavily indebted countries. Projects that cite development and improvement of the nation are carried with funds borrowed from other governments and international organizations, hereby putting the future generations and even those unborn in debt, assuring a kind of continuity in poverty.

The average income per head in the country is tremendously low, life expectancy seems to be on a constant drop and in some parts of Cameroon some persons cannot even afford a decent meal on their table, not to talk about affording the three meals required in a day.

State coffers are plundered day in day out by individuals who have no interest in seeing a developed Cameroon and who are effectively part of the problem for which they are supposed to find solutions. Almost everyone in a position to impart any change is just merely trying to fill his or her pocket and walk away seeming to have lost hope in their own ability to repent.

The things that plague our country are not alien to us; in fact, they are our day-to-day experiences. Every day we happen to witness one thing or the other that reinforces the bleakness of hope in a better Cameroon. But is this the definition of Cameroon? Is this the vision our founding fathers had in mind when they laid down their lives, one after the other for the love of their nation? The obvious answer will be a resounding “NO!” as Wandji Wilfred would put it.

One cannot help but ask, “What went wrong?” This is a question we must all ask ourselves. Where did the older generations fail and what can we the youths do to remedy this situation? Which capital moves can be made individually or collectively to assure some degree of positive change in the country that will permit us to leave as inheritance to our own progeny a better Cameroon than the one we met?

In the course of this write-up I would be tendering my humble opinion on what I think is of great importance in Cameroon. Where we can start from to produce change with a ripple effect to affect positively all spheres of life in Cameroon. So that by the time we have left this world, we would be able to beat our chests in pride, because we would have passed on a gift to proceeding generations. For what is life without a legacy?

It is quite clear that if you do not run your money, then you run very little in your life. If you always need to reach out to one person or the other in an attempt to get the basic things in your life, then you really cannot claim a certain degree of autonomy. In this light, I believe that one of Cameroon's greatest pitfalls is the fact that Cameroon as a country is essentially a consumer economy. More than 75% of the goods and services used in the country are imported from other countries and companies controlled by foreigners produce even those branded products Made in Cameroon.

Cameroon is stuck at the primary sector - the development of raw materials. We know and do very little towards transformation of our raw material to finished or semi -finished goods. The industrial sector is very dormant for a couple of reasons. Our educational system does not prepare us for production and industrialization. Our schools and institutions focus on the KNOW-WHYS giving very little consideration to the KNOW-HOW.

We are schooled in the mindset of job seekers and never pushed to think about being job creators. When we finish school with such a mindset and get thrust into a system suffering from very high levels of unemployment, frustration cripples us, pushing many youths to resort to unorthodox means of earning income for themselves.

Even those who are employed are mostly employed by foreigners who care very little for their welfare – going largely under-paid and rarely experiencing job satisfaction. What we get is a people reduced to some sort of robots who live in a routine boredom developing lazy habits of thinking which in turn leads to decreased productivity and a complete annihilation of their creativity.

We have those who are daring enough to use their creativity to come up with something worthwhile that mostly get shoved to the background with no follow up. Their ideas are left to die natural deaths caused by lack of support; meanwhile others just crumble under the heavy weight of the taxation system; a system which is greatly dependent on the whims and caprices of the taxation officer standing in front of you. With such a situation we see that innovations are hard to come by and even those who try, do so with a kind of timid frailty that does not permit them to truly impact the economy.

Then, we have the inferiority complex that is one of the major reasons why there is little industrial innovation in Cameroon. Cameroonians who dare to venture in the world of industrialization are sort of asphyxiated out of activity by the market. The products produced by Cameroonians are met with a lot of disdain and disregard on the market, no matter the quality of these products.

In Cameroon there still exists a kind of status attributed to those who consume foreign goods. The ideology which stipulates that western goods are better than home made products has eaten deep into the Cameroonian society such that, the local industrial manufacturer finds himself frustrated in the market. The erroneous believe that anything imported is automatically better than anything produced in the country has dealt a deadly blow to the country’s economy.

So is all hope lost? NO.

There is now more than ever a wind of change blowing towards the positive, with many youths seeking self-reliance and accomplishment.

Our millennials are slowly regaining consciousness for our country. We have started identifying our problems and we have started gaining the courage to admit we have failed woefully in the past and that is a good start. The solutions cannot be simple ones so we need to put our minds together to solve them. And we can only do that if we actually CARE about our communities.

We have to begin by organizing our communities and reaching out to those of us who are not necessarily on this train of thought already.

- Asafor Ndifor

📷: Chevening