On the occasion of The International
Labour Day, Dr. Nick Ngwanyam x-rays work, its correlation with the Bible and
the attitude of Cameroonians toward work.
According to him, work is not all
about money, but about the love towards it. Celebrating labor Day in Cameroon
has been misconstrued according to him because most Cameroonians do not
actually know what and why they are celebrating. In this incisive interview, he
defines work and makes pertinent proposals on what work should all be about in
order to help our nation to emerge.
Doctor,
it is a pleasure we are having another discussion with you on the eve of the
International Labour Day. What is work?
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| Dr. Nick Ngwanyam |
It is really important for us to
really understand the concept of work. This is because if you do not understand
the concept, you would go celebrating the way we do in Cameroon. Whether you
are celebrating for the right or wrong reason, you would never know. I think
the International Labor Day is a great thing. It is a day set aside for workers
to stay away from work and really have a day for themselves and enjoy what work
is supposed to be, enjoy the fruit of their labor, commune with one another and
their spirits. This would enable them to continue working effectively.
There is no way you can
talk about workers without talking about their work places, what they produce,
the effect in the community, development and in the lives of their families.
You cannot talk about a worker without talking about the employer, for those
who are self employed, that is a different story. You must talk about the
industry where they are working. These are the elements that you must take into
consideration.
Before we go into
analyzing many of these things, let me go back to some principles. If we want
to understand work very well, we must go down to the foundation of work. Work
is something that God himself instituted. It is very important to know that
work was not instituted by man and there is a manner in which we should be
working which would meet God’s standards. If you are not working, it is a sin.
The bible goes on to say that, he who does not work should not eat. These are
basic things.
We are faced with a situation where
people do not want to work, but they want to eat. That is where the problem
lies. You do not work but you want to have the benefits of those who work.
It is said that in six
days, God created heaven and earth. On the sixth day, he created man. So God
spent six days working and on the seventh day he rested. God also expects us to
work for six days and rest on the seventh day. Whatever that seven day is for
us; is it a Friday like for the Muslims, Saturday like the Methodists or
whatever, rest. Is it on Sunday like for the Christians? The important thing is
to have one day in a week during which you rest. This is to renew your body and
to renew your spirit so that when you go to work, you should be refreshed.
That said, we have established the
fact that work was created by God, and he worked. There is no way God can work
and man refuses to work. So when I see a lot of Cameroonian youth who do not
want to work but think that they are getting it right, they are getting it
wrong from the foundation.
Do
you mean Cameroonians do not like to work or do not want to work?
Cameroonians do not like to work and
do not understand why they have to work. If a Cameroonian could have his way in
life to earn a living, pay his rents, eat food, drink, run after women and fly
to France without working that would be the best for him.
We have
grown up with a mindset where we like things for free. You want something but you do not want to pay the price
for having that thing. Just having something without doing anything would be
the best things for most people. You do not want to be responsible enough. The
Americans say, “There is no free lunch.” That is, ‘there
is nothing like something for nothing’.
You know there is this
gambling going on. It is called “parifoot,” horses or whatever, see how many
young men at 8A.M. gather around those places looking for cheap meals. You want
to grow through life by winning something. That is fey mania. What happens in
life is, if you plant plantains, cocoyam, cassava or banana and come after the
appointed time you would harvest the same.. But what we do is to harvest
without planting. That is our mindset.
I think our elders have
failed us because they have not shown us what we ought to do before we eat.
Everybody just comes up thinking that you can just be smart and get it right.
It is not possible. Most of the time when you employ to work for you or people
who come looking for a job in your establishment, they want to put in minimum
input for maximum benefit. That is a problem as well. When you go
to the labor office which is there to arbitrate; though the employers might
have their weaknesses; the employees also are just looking for an opportunity
to just get something without putting in something.
On both sides in the
whole nation therefore, we need a lot of education. To create a business or
something that generates an income is not an easy thing, and therefore, when
you do the best in terms of quality work, quality time and you are efficient
and use the inputs in that institution efficiently, you make the institution to
grow.
When the institution grows, you grow
and you make the nation grow. But when you try to cheat by holding back, you
kill the people and the nation as well as vision 2035. You know it is
said that in Cameroon, the civil servants give in only 25% of what they are
expected to put in and they want full pay along with the bribes and corruption.
That is the mentality.
Before
we get to the employer/employee mentality, can you elaborate on the issue of
celebrating work at a time like this?
I am still coming back
to it. When you are celebrating Labor Day, you are effectively celebrating
work well done.
So
who should celebrate?
We should all celebrate.
Whether it is an employee, employer or government, we should all celebrate. But
what is the point in celebrating when you did not actually work.
It is wrong. A lot of people celebrate when they did not put in what calls for
a celebration. What calls for a celebration is effective, efficient and useful
work that moves the country and every body forward.
Who
should be blamed? Should we put the horse before the cart or the cart before
the horse in terms of an employer celebrating based on achievement or a worker
not celebrating based on what he was expecting.
I do not know. The
employers cannot win on their own; and the employees cannot win on their own
either. It is a win-win situation. We all have to work
together, keeping our minds on the most important goals and objectives. The
main objectives are for the success of the company, civil service, the ministry
or the government. That is what should be in our minds.
We work collectively so
that whatever organization we are in succeeds. When we do that, the
employer and the employee would jointly celebrate the success. We should work
in a way that we are not tearing down that institution and its objectives. If
we are not working like that from both sides, then there is no reason to
celebrate.
There
must be a mentality between the employer and the employee. What is a
Cameroonian mentality on that basis?
To begin to understand
the Cameroonian mentality, let me first of all define what His Eminence
Christian Cardinal Tumi put down together as a path to success. You know he is
a Wiseman and if he says something and you try to depart from it, you would
only hit the rocks. You would not go far. If he says it and you understand it,
fine. If you do not, then just take it as gospel truth and work on it. He says
to succeed, be it a company, a community or a country; you need to do six
things. You cannot do one and leave out the other things. You must carry out
the six things simultaneously.
Primo, you must like
work.
Secondo, you must like work
that is well done. So you see, we have six points and what is taking two of
those points is first you must like work and work that is well done.
The third thing is that
you must be honest. Honesty counts. Be it the employer or the employee,
a child, the teacher, minister, the gendarme, or police, we must be honest. But
you know that honesty is a rare commodity in Cameroon.
The fourth thing is you must have self
discipline. There is no way you are going to succeed in whatever you do
without self discipline. Self discipline means your body is driving you to do
something to waste time and resources, yet you know the right thing to do. So
you begin to fight your body, fight your own desires and fight your
human weaknesses to stick to what is important. You learn to do unto others as
you would want them do to you. Always deal with people on a win-win
basis. Your one should be your one and your two your two.
The fifth thing is that
you must pray. Whatever you conceive your God to be, know that you
cannot function in this world without a spirit being. The spirit being to those
of us who believe in God the Almighty; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the
God who created us and made heaven and earth, we ought to pray to Him in
spirit and in truth. If you believe that your own god is a mango tree or your
father’s skull, pray to him but know that we must pray because we are spirit
beings and we must subject our spirit, our minds and what we do to the spirit
being that leads us. The problem is, to which spirit are you subjecting your
own spirit and being to? Is it to God, the Almighty or to Satan? Whatever you
do, you must reap the fruits of the spirit to which you have subjected yourself
in prayer and to which you have surrendered yourself in thinking.
The sixth thing is, you must
respect the environment. What is the environment? The environment is
everything that you see, feel, touch and hear. In our Bible, we learn that in
six days God created the heavens and the earth. So everything that is found in
heaven and the earth is the environment. Let us put it in another way, respect
everything that God created. It includes the land, animals. trees, grass,
birds, bacteria, water, clouds, the air, sunshine, the rainfall and man. You
must respect the environment because without the environment, we are dead. The
environment is what is sustaining us and we must work to transform that
environment in a positive way. That is giving value to what God gave us. When
you fell a tree and you season that tree to make chairs and tables you create
and add value and that is what work is all about.
Let
us x-ray the Cameroonian laborer’s mind and tell us what he would have or ought
to be thinking.
Let us put it again this
way. You know the fireside has three stones. If you want to cook ‘fufu’ or
cocoyam or whatsoever, you need three stones. You cannot use two stones. If you
use four stones, it will create more problems. When it comes to work, laborers
the company and what we do are those stones. We need the laborers, we need the
employers, and we need the work place. We need these three things for work to
be effective.
Therefore, the employer
has to have a certain mindset to drive the institution forward to increase
productivity using less energy to get the maximum benefit. The laborer too
should have that mindset of work in consent with the employer for the best of
the institution and the country. If we do not have that mindset, we get it all
wrong. If we try to cheat, we are only cheating ourselves.
Most of the time, the
Cameroonian laborer does not care about the workplace. After all, it belongs to
someone else or to the government that has no face. He does not want to grow
the workplace. If there is anything, he goes out there and tries to discredit
his workplace. When he comes back now because he has been discrediting his
workplace, he has a negative mindset toward this workplace. He turns back now
to play the hide and seek game in the work place. He becomes an eye servant
only working when somebody is watching over him. 80% of Cameroonians behave
like that. They are eye servants. They do not want to work.
How
do you relate that kind of paradox to brain drain?
I have seen people
who have worked here and earned about CFA600,000 to 700,000 a month. They think
it is better in America. When they drop it and run to America thinking
that they would carry that mindset there, they realize that they have to do
three jobs and have to work their asses out to pay bills. In America, you do
not answer a phone call while on duty.
So a lot of Cameroonians who do not
know what work is here, when they go to America, they have to learn what work
is otherwise they would sleep in the streets. If you really want to know what
work is, go and ask those who have come back from America and they would tell
you. Check out on MTN, Orange, Guinness, Brasseries or CongelCam and you get a
clue what work should be in Cameroon.
Work
as you define it, is the love to work. Do you really think we know how to work?
No, we do not know how to work
because there is no way you can work if you do not love your job.
Let us try to redefine work again. Work is the mental and physical energy that
you put in to achieve a certain goal. We go to school to learn, to get
knowledge, skills and the knowhow that equips us to solve problems. If you
go to school as many of us do and you are not ready to solve a problem, then
the school was useless.
So
the reason why you go to school is to have the ability to solve problems. The
problem we have had with our school curricula is that we are not taught how to
solve problems let alone solving specific problems. For example you just go
school to learn Geography, History, Mathematics, Religion and English and you
do not know how to solve a problem. That is the fundamental error that we have
been making.
What
would you propose?
We have to ask one basic question. Why
did God create me? Why did God create you? God created you for four things.
If you go to your bible, you would know why God created you. If you do not know
why God created you, you would make a lot of mistakes.
God created us to praise
Him and worship Him every day and at every moment. We have to live or to
dwell in his presence. He created you to love Him and to love him above
all other things else.
These are the
three fundamental reasons why God created you and me. You have to realize that,
that is what the choir of angels spends twenty four hours every day worshiping
and praising God. We have to join that choir of angels in our prayers as well.
Then there was a fourth assignment
that God gave man on earth. He set him in the Garden of Eden and said, ‘You are
going to multiply in this garden’. You are going to continue with co-creativity
in this garden. You have to add value to the Garden of Eden.
There is no way you can add value to
something you do not love.
One reason we are failing
a lot in Cameroon is because when a competitive exam is launched, for instance
for the recruitment of Custom officers, every young man does it. When the one
of gendarme is on, the very people who went in for customs go for it. The one
for teachers or medical doctors, all of them go for it. They are
struggling for survival. To work and work effectively, you have to do the job
that you like so much so that even if there is no salary, you will still be
doing it. If the salaries are delayed, you will still be doing it.
If you pick up a job
because of a salary only, you would never like that job. Most of the time, we
in Cameroon go in for jobs not because we like them but we are looking for a
means of survival. So there is a difference between work and the opportunity to
survive. In Cameroon, we try to work for money. No! Usually in life; the way
God put it is; you work for the sake of the job and money and happiness come
later as bonuses. When you work for the sake of the job, then you become
happy and you have joy. But when you work for the sake of money you can never
jump out of your bed and go to work because you do not like the job. You
love but the money behind the work.
We are failing a lot in
Cameroon because people work for money and not for the love of work. You have
to know the problem that you want to solve, and have a clear understanding of
how to solve the problem. Each time you solve a problem you are happy. The
salary that you earn is just a motivation. Your real motivation comes from the
joy you get from solving a problem.
Work actually boils down to
choosing a career. What is a career? A career is a set of problems that John
chooses to be solving down the road in his life. When you are choosing a
career, it is not different from choosing a wife. If you want to get married,
you do not just run into the bar and get one. All the women have got two
breasts, nice legs and good eyes but not all are the marrying type. You must
choose a wife that you would love until death do you part. You choose a
career based on love.
On
the occasion of the International Labor Day, what message do you have for
workers and the youth?
We have come to this world to work.
If you have not come to work, then you are getting it all wrong. If you are
going to be cheating to feed yourself, that is not work. Work means you have to
burn up time, energy and produce something. If you are trying to make a living
without working, it would not work. You can win in a lottery and buy food, that
is not work. Work means adding value to a system. In Cameroon our
work efficiency and everything is not more than 25%. This manner of work cannot
take us to 2035.
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
