Dr Nick Ngwanyam Appreciates Celebrations Marking President Biya’s 32nd Anniversary at the Helm of Power

 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.

6^th 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, 6^th 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 6^th 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 6^th, 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 6^th 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 8^th 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)