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| Dr. Nick Ngwanyam |
If you know that there
are things in your life that you ought to change and you are waiting for a New
Year or beginning of New Year to be able to correct that thing then there is
something wrong with you. The best way to live is to seek everyday to do God’s
Will. In doing God’s Will you know that you would always be falling and rising
like Christ was falling and rising with the cross. Life is about rising and
falling with that cross and keeping your mind where you want to go without
distractions. That is the best way to do it by trying as much as possible in the journey of life, to eliminate what is
not useful and bring on board what is useful. In July if you realize that there
is something good for you to do; you make that realization in July. It makes
sense to start putting that into practice in July and not to wait for December
to start it. That is how it works.
Are
there certain things that you want to do for the State and the common person in
2015?
For the common person,
yes of course I have been working on that. I will only say that in 2015 I would
do more on that and for the State I would be a good citizen by being patriotic.
Everything that you do for the state starts with patriotism whether it is small
or big.
Many
people may not even understand what you mean by patriotism.
Patriotism is the love
for your country and it starts with the love for yourself. You have to love
yourself, love your neighbor and your country with the understanding that God
did not make a mistake to put you here in this Cameroon. To be born Cameroonian
is not a mistake. If you do not love your country, what you are saying is that
God made a mistake to put you here.
On
the 31st of December, people are always keen to listen to the Head
of State. In 2014, he spoke and addressed a number of issues. One of them had
to do with the fact that we Cameroonians do not consume home made products.
Probably he had been informed that we have those products in the market.
He was born and bred
here so he should know what we have. It might be when he became the president;
he was not being given the things that are produce in our country. He certainly
eats the paw-paw and mangoes that are grown here. They could not be imported.
When he says we should consume Cameroonian stuff, he is right because we live
on 95% of imported stuff which is actually a wrong mindset. There is no way you
can be selling timber and oil to buy goods produce in other people’s country
when you have the capacity to produce probably 75% of those things. It does not
mean that we should not import. Even America with the highest technology still
imports. China imports and everybody imports but they pick and choose what they
are importing.
What you and I should
be importing now is not rice, eggs, frozen chicken, Champaign; not all these
wines, ready-made cloths and so on. Carry out this experiment with me. Look at
everybody who is doing some kind of sport every morning. See what they are
wearing. See all our primary, secondary school and university students, they
all have sport wear. All of those things come from China. Take for instance
that our tailors are not good enough to make the best Italian suits or whatever,
but at least they are good enough to get this synthetic material and sew these
sport wears here. Already we can start in a small way with the little
technology at our disposal to reduce some of the money that we are wasting like
that. Think of it. There is none of the
sport wears that is used anywhere that is made in Cameroon. If we begin to look
very critically, we would see into those areas that we have to be working to be
able to satisfy our needs.
Is
it enough to take a decision that we
have to consume our goods? First of all they have to be available and we need
to have the right polices to produce them.
That is correct. Like
you have mentioned policy, most of us fold our arms and wait for the
president’s speech to do things. We behave as if the president were God. He
decrees things and they happen. No it does not work like that. The president is
just a human being like you and I. Nature might have put all the resources in
his hands and he is using all those resources to help us develop and meet our
needs. It does not matter what he does, he is just one human being with two
hands.
As a leader; at the end of the year; he comes
out and says what it is we could do better and he comes out on a platform and
says; dear Cameroonians, brothers and sisters this is what we could do to fare
better.
He actually calls us
brothers and sisters because we are not his slaves. What we should be doing at the receptive end
is to begin to understand what he is
trying to say and try to see how we fit into that program and wake up from our
comfort zones, fold our sleeves so to speak and then go to work. Work with that
mind frame and on that vision.
If the year turns
around and we do not have results then we try to figure out different ways to
make it work so that in three, four or five years’ time; we would not only be
consuming Cameroonian, we would be exporting Cameroonian. Until we realize that
he was not talking to trees; he was actually talking to us the human beings and
if we also understand that the most important element in the formula is that
human person and we have to do something, we shall not grow.
We should come together
with him; we join hands together with him and make things work. If we think
that we are just going to sit around in bars, drink and only comment about the
president’s speech without doing something about it, thinking that some people
are going to come from the moon to make it work, then we deceive ourselves.
Do
you have the impression that there are some people in Cameroon who do not even
care to analyze what the head of State says?
Most people do not and that is why a lot of
people want to be civil servants because when you are a civil servant, you do
not have to care. You do not have to bother. You can only bother about one
thing; whether there is a salary. If there is a salary, you stop thinking. If
there is no salary they complain. The president gave a whole speech but people
did not care; even the CRTV was at fault. All the CRTV did was to go out with
cameras to show how the bars were empty and how there was not enough beer. We
have become a beer nation and I was just so surprised that we could not
concentrate on something so important than going around in bars. We have been
drinking so much that we do not actually think. It is really a pity.
Do
you also have the impression that Cameroonians throughout the year work knowing
that the head of State might use what they have produced to make a good speech?
There are a lot of
things that we have to change in our psyche. Even the few Cameroonians who work
are not appreciated. We have to come to a point where we have to start
appreciating good work for what it is. To be able to understand; you know, take
things like medals.
The medal awards go to
the wrong people. They are not genuine. If I have been working well, then I
have to apply to tell someone that I am working well; please decorate me. A lot
of fey men have been using that to put things on their chests which do not have
any meaning. We have not really attached importance to most of the things. You
have to be able to recognize people who work by giving them an opportunity to
work even more. The bible says that to him that is given two talents, when he
uses them well more would be added. But it looks like in Cameroon, even the few
talents that you have are taken away from you and those with zero talents are
given more. So we have reversed that
principle.
I talked awhile ago about the policy to make
things work in Cameroon and the idea of consuming home made products. Who is at
the forefront of that policy?
The President; it is
the president and his government. Those policies are very important. Let’s look
at the case of a country like Gabon today. Gabon has a very good medical system
and you know one of the ingredients that go with the health care system is
drugs. What push the cost of health care are the cost of drugs and the
availability of good drugs. We sit here, import drugs from all over the whole
place amongst them some Chinese, Indian and some made in Nigeria drugs. There
are good drugs and there are bad drugs. We do not know which is which. Our
markets are flooded with everything and our pharmacies have drugs coming from
foreign countries. We as Cameroonians should know that we have come of age and
should start producing our own drugs. We cannot produce a hundred percent of
what we need, but at least let the 85% of what we need be produced in Cameroon.
The very common things
like the paracetamol, the malaria drugs, antibiotics, medicine for doing
wounds, cough syrups and balms could be produced here in Cameroon. If we cannot
make drugs for cancer, we can import that one, but we cannot just be importing
everything down to water. It is wrong.
You
have just said that the person who should be drafting the policy for the
production of home products should be the president and his government.
Yes, that is correct.
It cannot be the villager.
When
you send your mind back to those who invented the machine or whatever, did they
start with the government?
We have the luck that
we do not have to invent anything. We just have to copy it. You know those Xerox
machines or photocopiers, the technology has been discovered. Somebody has
already done the donkey work and shown that when you want to do agriculture,
these are the equipment that you use. It just has to be like this. We know all
of that but our problem in Cameroon is just the inability to copy. That is
where our problem is. We do not have to discover anything at all. As far as I
am concerned, all those research centers in the country, maybe we would need
them in the future when we must have already used what is at our disposal and
we need more, then we can research. We are researching when we have not yet
used what is at our disposal. That is a problem.
Talking about drugs for
instance, somebody already started trying to produce drugs in Douala just as we
are talking policy; it did not work because of undue, unjust and unnecessary
taxes. We have people who are trained in ENAM, who do not understand anything
and they just formulate taxes which closed minds.
If the Head of State
really wants us to grow, if he wants us to emerge before 2035; if he really
wants our industrialization to pick up, he should understand that taxation is
killing us. Policy is killing us and that is very important. People are trained
to survive but the system kills the chicken that lays the golden egg.
Most
people must have been waiting for the Head of State to speak about the fight
against corruption. He said nothing. It looks as if he is tired?
I guess he is tired. We
have made no progress. It has gone worst. If he started the speech by
mentioning corruption, most people would have switched of the Television and
gone to drink more bear. This is because it would be the usual old story. He
would say corruption and what did we do about it? Many Cameroonians would be
excited to hear that with corruption;
we catch people who
have embezzled state funds, take back that money and invest in the economy. We
punish them so that people can see it. But the prisons are full and overflowing
with corrupt officials but we have seen no penny collected yet. There is a
problem there and nobody is interested.
There
are some who are paying back the money.
Well, if they are
paying back the money, let us hear them say on the radio how much they stole,
how much has been collected and what are the timeframes. If there are a hundred
corrupt officials, how many of those are paying? Is it just one or two that are
paying? Is it 98% that are paying? That is what is important.
The
fact that the Head of State did not mention it, I thought it meant that we have
made some progress?
We are not making
progress because there is no enabling environment for growth. We are looking at
corruption as a problem. If you just try to attack corruption it would not
work. What we need to do is to correct the whole country and correct the whole
government. A teacher can only correct the scripts of the child if the teacher
knows the truth.
Therefore, if we are
running away from the truth, if we are trying to correct when we are not
respecting merits and norms it would not work.
That is where the
problem has been. The devil cannot cast out the devil. You must know the truth
by respecting merit to be able to correct corruption. So if you put people who
are corrupt in place; people who do not know the truth and do not respect
merit; people who went to ENAM themselves by paying their way into ENAM and you
want them to fight corruption; it would never work. We must first begin to
learn what merit is and respect it, what truth is and respect it and the whole
nation would correct itself.
For
corruption to go away, we must have Cameroonians of integrity…
They are there; it is
just that a larger part of people tell lies especially in politics. They choke
the system and choke the president especially with lies. They choke everyone else
with lies and blackmail. The president has realized that and that is why he is
changing his tactics.
It
means that there are men of integrity in Cameroon?
Yes, of course. You
cannot have a country that is completely rotten. It exists nowhere in the
world.
Are
those persons of integrity making any effort to increase their numbers?
We just have to create
an enabling environment and we grow more. As of now, most of the youths in
Cameroon have been made to think that you have to be crooked to survive. There
have seen a lot of crooked people making it. They have seen a lot of crooked
people riding big cars, living in the best houses and flying to France and
coming back. So they think it is a way of life.
Is
there a possibility of helping this young people you are talking about to
become persons of integrity?
Yes, number one by
teaching civic education in our schools, by teaching them the love for one
another and the respect for each other and
making sure they begin to see that merit and truth count. If you do not
teach them to see that merit and truth count, then what ever we try to do would
not work. If the country is decaying, it is because merit and truth have been
thrown to the dogs.
What difference does it make Dr. Ngwanyam to
teach the children civic education in school? They are at home and seeing what their
parents do.
That is correct. We are
talking of an environment. It has to be like rain that falls on everybody. But
when the rain is falling, some people had prepared their farms and some have
not. Those that prepared their farms would have the harvest.
Have
you heard that there are some government schools that the parent must pay for
their children to gain admission? In those schools can we teach civic
education?
