Broadcasted on Nov 2014 on CRTV Yaounde
 |
| DR. Nick Ngwanyam |
Between
1993 and 1990, the commemoration of
President Paul Biya’s coming to power was the affair for all Cameroonians.
During that period, persons in positions of responsibility with the public
administration went back home to recount the story of the succession to the
villagers and asked for continuous support for the President. With the advent
of multiparty politics, it has become the affair of the militants of the CPDM.
Last
November 6, 2014, CPDM militants went through bad roads to their respective
villages for the exercise. Critical minds have begun to ask questions. Should
it be the affair of the CPDM when it concerns the Head of State and not the
chairman of the party? Is it still necessary to go to ones village with the
same old message? Is it the best way to support the Head of State? Why do
people roll out drums to celebrate the new deal while still operate like
persons with raw deal mentalities.
Today, we
are receiving a militant who because of bad roads could not take the old
message to his people in the village, Dr. Nick Ngwanyam.
6th November 2014, I was
in Bamenda at the Congress Hall. Naturally and normally, I would have gone to
Ntundip but sometimes the strain and stress is so much that one cannot just
move like that. With the time I had, I had to stay in Bamenda and even that, it
was a little bit tricky.
When you
say it was tedious for you to go to Ntundip, were you taken by surprise?
There is what we call the
opportunity cost. You cannot do everything you want to do because you are just
a human being and cannot be in two or three places at a time.
It was an
affair of the CPDM.
Well, 6th November is
supposed to be for everybody irrespective of their party leanings. But it would
look like if other party members show up, it would be selling their birth right
to the CPDM. There is a kind of animosity between parties and one can
understand that.
Is it
actually an affair of the CPDM
I do not think so because we were
celebrating 32 years of the New Deal. The new deal is a philosophy that is
being practiced by everybody; I would suppose. It is about a new thinking;
doing things differently in a positive way and changing from a monolithic past
to a democratic present. You just noticed that in 32 years, it has been a
little bit tricky and I think that is where the problem is.
You say it
is not an affair for the president, remember that it was in 1982, 6 November
that he took over. So it should be his own kind of anniversary at the helm of
the State.
I am glad you said that; at the helm
of the state and not at the helm of the CPDM party. So you are right.
You guys
of the CPDM are making a mistake or you are misleading the public?
That is exactly why I say it is more
of a celebration of the new deal and not a CPDM celebration. Nobody stops the
other parties from celebrating, they stop themselves from celebrating.
The issue
is when you people come out in party outfit, you give the impression that it is
an occasion for the CPDM.
Again as I said it is a democracy
and there are three hundred parties in the nation and one would have expected
the three hundred parties to come out in their own party regalia; not to
celebrate President Paul Biya but to celebrate the new deal. They do not want
to celebrate the new deal I guess, it is because they have their own party
agenda and it is their right.
Do not
forget, they are some Cameroonians who do not belong to political parties.
Let’s put it again this way. I think
we have got a lot of our concepts wrong. Though we talk of democracy and we are
saying that we have more than three hundred political parties in the nation. If
you look at it in reality; if we are supposed to move forward as a nation; we
should not think for one minute that we have three hundred political parties in
Cameroon. As far as I am concern, we have two political parties. Then we have
two or three others who are power brokers. They would swing to the left or the
right depending on many issues and more often than not, they do not swing
because of the truth, they swing because of personal interest. That is the
unfortunate thing about Cameroon. If we really want to go forward as a
nation, we really have to be talking about two political parties and help them
to find a common ground so that we can progress.
Let us get
things right. What stops you from going back to your village? Is it because of
the road?
Yes of course, the road to Donga
Mantung has been a nightmare. I would like to thank the government here for
doing the roa. I think it is from Ndop Plain up to Kumbo. That is as far as it
goes otherwise from Bamenda to Ndop itself is not a road to talk about. From
Kumbo to Nkambe is still a nightmare and when we branch to places like Ntundip,
we do want to talk about that. Just to tell you, I came down from Bamenda to
Yaounde and we spent about an hour or so in a place called Nkobou. There is
this big gorge on the road and vehicles have to cue to go through that gorge.
It looks very much like the road going to Donga Mantung two years back. I was
very surprised because it is not really something to talk about. I spent one hour
there and we had to come out of our vehicle. So the roads are very bad.
You may
complain that the road in Ntundip is bad. People might be suspecting that you
did not go because the road is bad, but because you did not have a message for
the people.
I do not know what message you want
me to talk about. But if you just go to rejoice, drink and eat, then there is
really no point. If you have been going from year to year and bringing out
these issues, you should bring something new. The people should also notice
that there is a change on the ground. If there is no change and to the people
you keep repeating the same thing, it is like beating a dead horse.
Are you
saying that you do not have new messages for the people?
We as Cameroonians have got to change.
It is about mindset changes. For a very long time, Cameroonians
have this attitude of always wanting someone to give them something. They in
return do not give themselves anything and the give you nothing. They give
nature nothing. What do I mean, when we are talking about the development of
Cameroon, the progress and the growth that we are looking for, it is not
someone else who would come and give us. It is something that we generate
ourselves. So each time I have to talk to my people, that is the kind of
message I would like to share.
A lot of people over the years have
grown with the notion that, the government is kind of responsible for giving
them something. They are caught up in this mindset because like during
elections, they give them something. So when you come back to a village and you
tell them to take out their children for vaccination, it is for their good.
They want you to give them something to go for the vaccination. You might say
this kind of thinking is limited to people in the villages, it is not true. I
have seen many Cameroonians of good standing who would not go to a seminar; a
seminar that is supposed to help them improve on their standing, improve on the
way they do business, manage public property or their own property.
They would want that when you come
with the program, you should call them, pay their transport fare, lodge them in
a hotel, give drinks and food to eat, and give them money. Then they would come
to the seminar not because they did have any internal motivation. They would
snore throughout the proceedings, pretend to take some notes and go back. Five
years afterwards when you check nothing would have changed. That is the true
Cameroonian and that is why we have to change our mindset.
Where did
you get this idea about people waiting for things to be brought to them? Is it
not from you the elite?
I would say so yes. I have talked
several times on the radio about this thing that I call system thinking.
If you would understand this, you must get out of the box. The first thing I
would say is that Cameroonians do not thing out of the box. So we have a one
track mind. If you have a one tract mind, it does not help you. When you
travel, it gives you an opportunity for your mind to open and you see how
things are done and done differently by different people all over the world. I
get the impression that when we travel, we do not even learn from others. It is
a big problem.
Cameroon is a product of two
cultures; the Anglo-Saxon culture and the francophone culture. We came together
and we have been like that for all this while. But I would say that the
Anglophones when it comes to self development, doing things yourself, when it
comes to solving problems, identifying your problems and coming out with the
solutions, the ways and means, seeing what you can do to the best of your
ability while waiting for someone to help you; they are ok.
That is how we were taught and that
is how we grew up. But when it comes to east of the Moungo, they have a
different way of doing business. The state was all and all, owned everything
and things were monolithic. You were just supposed to sit in your straight
jacket and wait to be spoon-fed mentally. You could not think for yourself and
thinking for yourself was like criminal or something. I remember very well in
those days, if you just mentioned the president’s name they would start
throwing questions at you because there was always someone in the bar to find
out. If you had a slip of the tongue in one way or the other, it could cost you
a lot.
That is gone now, so we can say
there have been some positive changes brought by the new deal. That is what the
new deal is all about. The new deal is about switching off from that old
mentality, going through a slow process which has taken us thirty two years and
still has not matured. The engine is still grinding very slowly. I am talking
about a people who used to wait for everything to be done for them and were
even prevented to think for themselves. When you are dealing with a people like
that; it takes a long time to bring them up. They happen to be in the majority
and the Anglophones in the minority.
The Anglophone way of thinking was
absorbed so to speak. It is easier to be lazy than thinking for yourself.
That is the problem we have been facing. It is a huge problem in Cameroon in
the sense that we have lost our own capacity to solve our own problems. That is
why even today, when we have problems that are at our reach, we need the
Chinese to come and solve them for us, we wait for South Koreans to come and
solve them for us and we are not up to anything.
Dr.
Ngwanyam, I have the impression that the people of Ntundip missed this kind of
message on the 6th of November.
The point about it is that, I do not
think they really missed it because I have a particular problem. When I go to
the village and talk, even talking on the radio like this to Cameroonians, it
look like I am talking out of space. It looks like I am preaching a kind of
doctrine which comes from Mars and nobody understands. I am saying so because
we have a Ntundip yahoo’s group, we have a wimbum yahoo’s group, we have a BOBA
yahoo’s group and we share a lot of information on this media. We have a lot of
open discussions and sometimes I come out with a topic and just throw it out
there challenging the minds of people. You would be surprised with the kind of
thinking a lot of people have even the educated. All I can say is that
the thinking is still very primitive.
If you say
you have the Ntundip Yahoo’s group, it seems it is for the elite.
When you are talking of the yahoo
group, it is for the intellect and the literate because you could know how to
read and write but do not know how to use the internet, you are still an
illiterate. Literacy today is defined by the capacity to use computers and the
internet because that is the source of information and learning these
days.
We are
still talking about the celebration of November 6th, 2014; how did
you see life in the town of Bamenda?
We Cameroonians have a culture of
celebration, therefore; one celebration is just like the other. We celebrate
birthdays, death and the anniversary of that death, then we would celebrate
weddings and we are always looking for an opportunity to celebrate. To us
celebration means eat and drink. Celebration for us does not call for any hard
and fast thinking. Cameroonians are born to enjoy themselves. So celebrating
and enjoying ourselves is part of our culture. When you see a compound that is
full of people, if you ask them hard facts what it is all about, they would not
tell you.. If you were to stop a Cameroonian from drinking, there would be a
lot of trouble. So if you are asking me about merry making, I think there was a
lot of it.
Those who
were supposed to maybe change the way we observe anniversaries like that of 6th
November are supposed to be you people. Now, how are you carrying out the
sensitization so that in 2015, it should not be the same way?
We are talking about change and we
are talking about changing mindsets and the way we think. This is not about the
CPDM. It is about Cameroonians as a whole. How do we think, how do we identify
our problems, how do we come out with solutions and how do we face our
realities.
Have you
accosted CPDM militants to make sure that they do not make it a CPDM affair?
That is, they keep the CPDM outfit at home and make it inclusive.
Even if you kept the outfit at home,
it will still change nothing because old habits die hard. You are talking
about something that has been going on for thirty two years and you think it
could just be changed. It would not work. It’s been engrained in the people’s
mind as a CPDM affair which is not but that is the way it is. To me that is not
even where the problem is. The problem should be helping people to think out of
the box and be more progressive.
Are you
the elite organizing yourselves to help people think out of the box?
That is a huge problem because even
the elite do not agree amongst themselves. We have to be able to do that and
change our thinking because that is where the problem is. We still have not
developed the capacity to think out of the box. When you have a problem,
you always have to look at the solution from every angle and see what the
contributing factors to that problem are. Then in looking for solutions to the
problems, solutions have to come from different corners. The way we have a one
track mind, we always look in one direction for a solution. That is why we get
ourselves to a very tight corner yet we have solutions around us. That is why
we are not progressing. Our thinking capacity has not been developed. Our
educational system has not helped us a lot. The way we have been trained in
Cameroon is not very good for problem solving. Like I listened to Rev. Father
Tata Mbui talk on radio sometimes, he described our education and the way we
train children. We train tape recorders. They just churn out information that
they take. That is not the type of education that we need to solve problems.
Who is
responsible?
I guess we are all responsible. The
policy makers are responsible. Everybody is responsible. It is just like
everybody is responsible in the sense that even when you open doors to show
people a different way of doing it, they would like you to give them an extra
thirty two years to catch up. The problem is, we are slow learners and we are
slow changers. We do not copy. You see we started at independence with
countries like South Korea and Malaysia in 1960 at the same level, but because
those guys out there were able to change their mentality, knowing what is
important, knowing what is not important and making sure that when they get an
answer to something, they work on it making sure they get a concrete result.
But when we get an answer, we put it on the shelf and dream about it, debate
about it until it ruts on the shelf. That is not the way you grow.
Can I say
those problems really have to do with development because when you could not
get to Ntundip because the road is bad, and because the road is bad, many other
things go wrong in the village? It is not only you who could not get there.
Many other people could not. The question I want to put to you is; you talk
about it all the time, what are the elite doing to make sure that these people
in the village are educated to know that they can solve their own problems
rather than waiting on others?
It is really an unfortunate thing.
When we use the word “elite”, we should realize that elite does not mean the
people who are in the town. When you call them elite, the ones who stay in the
village, how do you call them?
The
internal Elite?
That word elite actually in itself
has generated a lot of animosity and created a lot of problems. Let’s go back
to the word because it seems we have been using it and coined that word to mean
something else to us Cameroonians. I do not know whether it means the same
thing to people in America or Japan. They would not use like that because it
has no meaning. Politically in Cameroon, elite is a kind of term which says
that you are set apart, you eat eggs and drink champagne and sleep in an air
conditioned house, but being an elite does not necessarily mean that you are
educated, you are smart or you know how to solve problems. That is where our
problems have been.
When an elite passes on, we tend to
say that he was a minister, but being a minister does not mean that you solved
problems. Just being a minister is nothing in itself if you do not solve problems.
So just being an elite, without having the capacity and without
solving problems is no good. This morning as I was coming down from Bamenda, I
met Mr. Avitus and co. They travelled from Yaoundé to go to Bamenda to have
this general village meeting in Bamenda. He is from Luh and Luh is just five km
away from Ntundip. They were talking development. They all travelled from
around the country to Bamenda to talk about development. That is what
elites do. You are an elite and you know what the problems are, how to solve
them and how to start making the people think self development. That is what
the elites do. You use your own funds, get out of your comfort zone, call
people around you, you brainstorm and you begin to do what you can with the
little you have, the best way you can. That is how development comes.
Even when
people leave Yaoundé, Douala and other towns back to the villages to talk
development, people in the village still see them as bringing in readymade
solutions to their problems.
That is why you cannot try to solve
problems and leave the village out of that. You always have to work together
otherwise, you bring solutions that they would not buy and you would never get
very far. It is very tricky because sometimes you are running with your
solutions, yet the villages are crawling at snail pace. When we are
talking about villagers and elite, do not forget there are problems too at
national level. In other countries for instance, they have internet all over.
They have the G4 and even faster systems all over for the education of the
people. We are celebrating a G3 and we think we have done a lot. In the
place of a village let use Cameroon and we see that we are not going very fast.
We are slow in Cameroon, we are slow as Africans. I do not know what is wrong
with us. I do not know whether black is a curse.
Sometimes
we blame the villagers. I mean we, that is, those coming from the town since
you say we should not use elite. Those of us coming from the towns, we go and
talk development and in a few weeks’ time we come to talk politics and there we
are not able to separate the two. There is a problem.
There is a problem there. I would
say that if we really want to develop, we have to separate a couple of things
and notions in people’s minds. First development has no color. That
means if you have a road in the village, it does not matter whether it was
brought by the CPDM or SDF. The road is for everybody. Development is about
common good. You can talk about self development. Wain Paul, you developed
yourself, your capacity to solve problems and get to know how to do things.
That is self-development. Then you can talk about the development of people in
a community. That is capacity building. Then now you talk about physical
development of the community. We are talking of amenities. All these things go
together. It is a bunch of things that are running together. But we have been
so polarized that we tend to be linking the development with party activity
which is unfortunate. When we do that, we begin to fight each other. We would
want to claim the proceeds from that development and use those for political
gains.
Is it
possible today whether you are from the CPM, SDF and we see you as our leader
as far as development is concerned?
In fact I would try to encourage
most elite to go above party politics. Always think in terms of brothers and
sisters. When you begin to think in terms of brothers and sisters, any other
barriers would breakdown. We would not be thinking Francophone/Anglophone, Beti/Nordist,
Catholic/Baptist that kind of thinking. We boxed ourselves so much that at the
end of the day nothing works.
When I
listen to you talk, Dr. Ngwanyam, I begin to ask myself how you usually react
during CPDM rallies or whatever? They present people with drums dancing, people
resigning from other parties to join the CPDM.
That is an unfortunate thing. That
kind of thing is promoted by the elite who want to gain popularity. They would
go and sometimes they would pay some youths and nobody can prove whether these
youths are from the opposite camp or whatever. You just put on your own colors
on them and make a big show of it as people who have resigned from the
other party. That in itself is not a very good thing.
We are
talking here about development. We are not saying that politics is bad.
Politics is not bad. In fact
politics is created by God. We have to be able to do politics God’s way. In
Cameroon, it is not progressing because we have left God out of the formula. In
our constitution somewhere it says that the state should be separated from the
church. It is good and bad at the same time. You cannot separate God from what
we do in a nation like Cameroon. Nobody in Cameroon owns Cameroon. Cameroon
belongs to God. We are tenants in the house and we begin to do things in the
house without thinking how the landlord thinks. If we are still
underdeveloped now, it is because we have left God out of the formula.
Cameroon is growing according to the
Baffia dance. That is two steps forward and three backward. If you want to keep
growing forward and actually accelerating, you must do it as God’s plan.
When I am talking about God here, I
am talking about something more serious. It is not because people say that they
are Christians that they are actually Christians. You do not have to sing about
it. It is about living in a manner to show that you know who your Father is. We
are talking of God here not as some celestial being that is far away that shows
up only on Christmas. We are talking of a Father with whom you commune every
moment of your life.
When I am travelling to Yaoundé,
Father I am going to Yaoundé, I am going to talk with Wain Paul Ngam. This
means you have to give me wisdom to say something that is useful to
Cameroonians, help me to speak in a manner that I do not set the country
ablaze, help me to be responsible, help me to always think common good, help me
to help myself and help others. Ask Him to bless you in everything that you do.
When you do that, it reminds you that you are not here on your own. It shows
that you have a responsibility to the God who created you. You have a
responsibility to the rest of the community, you have a responsibility towards
Cameroon and to humanity. That is the mindset. When you go to church on Sunday,
it is like recharging a battery so that on Monday, you are still a Christian,
on Tuesday you go for your midweek prayers and you are still a Christian;
Christian not by appellation. You are living the word. When I am using the word
Christian here I mean Christian in mind and spirit. God for is Muslims and God
is for everybody.
You said a
while ago that we have frustrated God because of our activities in Cameroon.
What problems do we have because of that?
Again I said we started with other
countries in 1960 and today they are sending us cars and airplanes and we still
cannot send them even ground coffee. The difference comes from our thinking.
Let me tell you, things happen in the spiritual realm before they manifest
themselves in the physical. Usually when you see something happening, you have
to ask yourself what is the spirit behind it. What is the spirit that controls
that manifestation? If the spirit is not the spirit of truth, love, salvation
then of course what it brings is death. So that spirit is the spirit of God,
the spirit of light, understanding, clarity, wisdom.
The bible says my people die for
lack of wisdom. They die because they do not ask me what they should do but do
it according to their own thinking and human thinking which is limited. That is
where the problem is. We need to be able to connect with
our God where ever we are and know that we are spirit beings. There is noway we
can function on our own. When you hook up as you hook up with your TV set to a
wrong socket, then you do not get power out of it. You have to hook up with God
and do it according to God’s ways. That is the only way we can have a
breakthrough in this country. It is not the CPDM, SDF or the three hundred
political parties that will bring you a breakthrough. It is not the nordists,
the Beti, Bamenda man that will bring you salvation. It is none of the above;
it is the person who owns Cameroon. Go to him confess your sins, get on your
knees and ask for wisdom so that he leads you. Do as he says and we will be out
of this mess sooner or later.
I do not
know whether from time to time, you as Dr. Ngwanyam; a Cameroonian and at the
same time a militant of the CPDM,; do you revisit that speech that was made by
the Head of State during the New Deal congress in Bamenda? He said those who
were embezzling public funds were militants of the party. He attributed so many
ills to the militants of the party. How many years have gone and the question
is what is happening?
There is no change and that is where
the problem lies. There is reason therefor, to find
out why we has not changed. It has not changed because we did not change the
spirit that controls us. He condemned us for embezzlement many years ago but we
are still doing exactly the same thing and even more. It is worse because the
wrong spirit controls us. We have to learn something from His Eminence
Christian Cardinal Tumi. On the 8th of December 2018, I can remember
the exact date, what he taught me that day is what Cameroon needs to grow. You
can do any other thing that you like, you can say whatever you like, campaign
as you like, beat as many drums as you want; Cameroon is not going to change
until everybody understands that principle and works on it. It is like starting
a car. You need a small key and the car starts. If you do not have that key and
you push the car as much as you want, do what you want the car would not start.
The car might be as small as what, it could be a very huge lorry or a ship or whatever
but what you need is that small key. So the question is; what is that small key
that Cameroon needs to really start moving on? If we do not understand what
that key is, if we do not understand how that key is used, we are wasting our
time.
So which
is that key?
I discovered the key when I was on
my way to the US and President Obama had just won the presidential elections. I
was like who is that man and he is just the first generation American in
the sense that his father just left Kenya, went there and had him in the
American system. He just decided and became the president. I am wondering that
America with about 250million people, a place like America, a young black boy
becomes a president? A guy who is younger than I am can lead a nation like America
and here I am not even able to lead my own family? Something is wrong.
The question was, how did he do
it? When I put the question to the cardinal, I put it this way; President
Obama has just won elections in America, what can we as Africans learn
from him that can help us do exactly as he has done and go faster and get to
solving problems rather than turning around? He said; President Obama was able
to win the election because he was on a platform. He taught me that, it
does not matter how strong you are. An individual is as strong as the
platform on which he stands. So Obama was strong because he was standing on
a democratic platform and that democratic platform supported him to win. That
is it. On his own, he was not strong. When you come back to the country, that
explains why the chairman Ni john Fru Ndi is so strong and was so strong in the
past. I do not know whether it is still the same but he is not strong because
of his physical muscles or whatever but he is strong because of the people who
supported him.
Therefore, when you start sending
away those people with article 8.2, it is like sitting on a branch and cutting
it. So you are as strong as the people who buy your ideology. You are strong
because of the people who believe in what you say. You are strong because
people believe that you speak the truth. You are strong because people can
count on you. That is the source of strength. Anything beyond that is not
strength. You are not strong because of an army. You are not strong because of
guns. You are strong because of the love you have for people. I learned about
this kind of strength when I read a book by Napoleon Hill; Think and Grow
Rich. In it he says that one of the strongest persons that ever lived
on this earth was Mahatma Gandhi. When I say Mahatma Gandhi, for those of you
who have seen his picture, he is a frail old man, with round glasses. He does
not have any tee-shirt on top his bare body. He has this loin cloth around him
and he is wearing sandals. He clutches unto a stick. That is a very frail man
who is said to be the strongest person that ever lived beside Jesus Christ.
So the question is what made him so
strong? The book goes on to answer that. He was so strong because he could help
200 million Indians to think in one positive direction. So your strength
lies in your ability to be able to convince people to thing in one direction
and do things in right and positive way. For all Cameroonians and all those
leaders of three hundred political parties, if you want strength, that is
strength. Help people to be able to think and get solutions to their problems.
Help the nation to think in one positive direction and that direction cannot be
your direction; it should be the direction according to God’s strength. What we
have been doing in Cameroon is a counterfeit. It is not power at all. We have
been doing things according to our ways.
I want to
believe that strength you are talking comes from people around you. Can we say
that the leader of this country has those around him who can give him strength?
It is a yes and no question because
when you are the president and you surround yourself with ministers and
advisers, senator and Mps and so on, you expect that they should be giving you
sound advice so that as a nation we can grow. But if these people are more
concerned with their stomachs then you hit the rocks.
Then you
need to put them aside?
I am not the one saying it. At the
beginning of the year, he made a speech in which he was lamenting that we have
all failed because there is individualism and the people are not helping
the government with the masses suffering. It is a collective evil spirit
that is in the country. That inertia is not only in government because when
he says so, we think it has to do with only people who are in government, no.
When you see young people drinking alcohol at 8AM, that is the extension of
that apathy. Cameroonians do not know what is called work. That
is the problem. Work is of different types. You have the mental work and the
physical work. You work to add value to a system. Cameroonians do not know how
to add value to a system. What we do, is to take value out of the system. That
is why we are failing. We waste time. We do not have industries. We do not
respect others. We do not respect common good. We have to make sure our
economy is growing not dwindling. Cameroonians have to learn what the
principles of life are and work according to them to grow.
If
you discover that those surrounding you are not giving you the support you
need, will you discipline them?
If you grow corn for a hundred
years, you can only harvest corn. Like the president, he condemns his ministers
and said they were not delivering the goods. Everybody was like ok, a new
government is coming. It is like delaying but it is not. It is just that for a
very long time, he has been growing corn and he thinks that it is time to grow
beans. When you want to change from growing corn to beans, you have to go back
into your inner chambers look at what was working and what was not working and
find out why it was not working. When you come to the drawing board you know
what you are doing, and you now do the right thing so that you can get
different result.
Earlier on
you condemned article 8.2 of the SDF, have you forgotten the fact that the CPDM
has started disciplining its militants?
When I heard the discipline of
militants I said waoh, this is nice. That is something good. A moment
ago I said the SDF and the CPDM are the only two political parties worth their
salt in this country. There is this divide amongst them where the SDF thinks
SDF and the CPDM thinks CPDM and their thinking stays with them. There have
been no cross bridges and that is wrong. When we will begin to witness these
cross bridges where the CPDM can look over what the SDF is doing and say the
SDF seems to be doing something right, copy it and use it to correct
themselves. Then that is when the nation begins to grow.
So, I was very happy to realize that
the CPDM has started to discipline people. In the CPDM, you have all sorts of
people in there. Like during the celebrations many of these people take the
front seat wearing president Biya’s effigy on the right breast, on the right
buttocks. Many of them are crocks. They take contracts and never execute them and
hide behind the party to do things. When the party begins to discipline these
people and shame them and send them away, then we are ready to grow. Article
8.2 is a very good thing. Discipline is not a bad thing; there is no where you
can survive without discipline. But if you also abuse the power that is given
to you to discipline people then it backfires. It becomes counterproductive.
Is it
possible to use the biblical approach to discipline people and apply it in
politics?
Yes of course, there is nowhere you
can do politics and succeed without doing it according to God’s principles.
What we have been saying and believing is that politics is dirty and is still
dirty. Simply defined, politics is about putting in a mechanism to come up with
policies. The mechanisms are the people, the suggestions from the people, the
councils, the senate and the parliament. They identify a problem and say, this
is the problem, what are the possible solutions and the check and balances.
They write that in a document. That document dealing with that particular
issue, describing it from beginning to finish is the policy. Solving the
problem then is applying that policy to the letter. The problem in Cameroon
is not the lack of laws; it is the application of laws. The inability to do
things right is the source of our problem. Why, because we know the truth but
we refuse to think it is the truth. We do not want to work and act and live the
truth.
We
complain so much about corruption in Cameroon. They are arrested, charged, tried
and jailed. People complain that they should not be jailed but they should pay
back the money.
It is a very tricky thing. When
people are saying let us have the money back, it is because if you keep them in
prison, give them even life jail, they have stolen so much money that their
families use it to do businesses and do whatever they want. They can be well
looked after while they are in prison. They might miss a little bit of
their freedom. But somebody in Ntundip will not benefit anything because the
money that was meant maybe to bring water in Ntundip has been swindled. When
you lock him up in prison, the man in Ntundip does not still have his water.
The man in Ntundip is saying; in as much as that man has stolen, I want my
water. Please take the money from him and build my water.
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
