One last post
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 14/Jun/2011 14:06, 34 days ago
To marketI’ve been back in England for almost a week. I’ve enjoyed the drizzle. I’m looking for a job. I can now just about leave the house without worrying that I’ve left my mosquito repellent behind, although I still drift wide-eyed through supermarkets. I’m going to end this blog now, but thank you, so much, to all those of you who have read it. Meanwhile, one last post with some final thoughts.Cameroon is in some ways an incredibly grim place. It’s been run by Paul Biya, an oppressive and aging dictator, for the past twenty six years. Despite the vast abundance of natural resources (oil, minerals, timber, cocoa, coffee, cotton, rice) there is almost no private sector and the economy is stagnant. Corruption and embezzlement is rife at every level, often so deeply embedded into the system that it is not even considered wrong or illegal.Vanishing trails of resource money, public money, and aid money have left endemic poverty in their wake, particularly in the North of the country. Many development indicators are getting worse, not better. Cameroon is the one country in Sub-Saharan Africa where maternal mortality is rising, not falling. And yet there is almost no voice of protest against the government.The finished classroom at MalkaThe majority of civil society organisations are inactive, incompetent, or dug just as deep into the rut of corruption as most of the public sector. Educated young people, who have no career options apart from those in the public sector, are too scared to publicly criticise its failures. The jobs they covet have to be bought with hefty bribes, and any blot on their record will result in immediate disqualification. And they’re not always even real jobs. Paul Biya recently announced that he was creating 25,000 new public sector jobs for young people. Everyone rushed to hand in their applications, paying the 4000 CFA application fee and often queuing for weeks or paying bribes to submit their application. A few weeksafter the deadline it was announced that these jobs were only for a temporary four year contract.Foreigners are hailed as bearing a magical panacea for all Cameroon’s ills, whilst simultaneously being blamed for all of its failures. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told that all Cameroon’s difficulties date from colonialisation (ended now for over fifty years), and that “You are a white person. You are more intelligent than us. You are rich. You have a responsibility to help us.” Suggest that the majority of Cameroon’s problems are caused by Cameroonians, and that the solutions can only be found if Cameroonians take responsibility for the corruption that is gutting their country, and you are met with incomprehension and occasional hostility.With little MischaSo‘where next for Cameroon’ is one of our most frequently uttered and unanswerable refrains, as is, inevitably ‘Should we, a development agency, be here at all?’ We ask ourselves if our meagre contribution to the minimal provision of public services is only serving to prop up a termite-hollowed state for just a little longer.And yet Cameroon was a wonderful place to live for two years and I loved it very much. I know for a fact that there are students who have desks, women who have a voice, babies who have an identity, and children who are at school because I passed through. I cannot begin to count the friends I have made, the sights I have seen and the lessons I have learnt.About a month ago I was on the back of a motorbike driving on a dirt path directly down the Cameroon-Chad border. I could see one country on my left and another on my right. We weaved past nomadic herdsmen on horseback driving their cattle down the river, fishermen mending their nets and canoes, mothers with babies on their backs and teetering piles of calabashes and bundles on their heads.At schoolI’d been giving a workshop to a group of chieftains on the importance of birth certificates and the Local Council’s new registration process. They sat on a mat under a canopy of woven reeds whilst I sat on one of the village’s precious plastic chairs and drank warm coca cola, a gift from the local chieftain. We were gathered outside his house and numerous children and young men of the village clustered round to find out what was going on.And I thought that, for that moment, there wasn’t any place I’d rather be or any job I’d rather be doing.