Les problèmes du Cameroun/The Problems Of Cameroon

By Babila  

"We must change and create the enabling environment for this to happen."
Indeed most of the richest donors on earth speaking on philanthropy on this channel (http://www.cnbc.com/id/10000312) before the World Economic Forum in Davos related a similar statement. There can do all what they wish, but an enabling environment and infrastructure has to be created by (an) other person or government.

And that is the bitter reality.

Volunteering for this association (www.insearchnetwork.com), we have come to see many types. You write an e-mail to some officials and replies never come. You place a phone call to a student to go tell them to verify their boxes for important projects you want to initiate for an institution in Cameroon from another institution out here (at your financial expense and risk of letting your job lie for a day, and transport yourself around for meetings), and nothing happens. People are just too big!
And because people are big, when you start coming with projects in an altruistic way, they think you want their job and play down on publicity of projects or begin to place sticks on your road. In some such institutions you would take a week to see even a secretary.
All is not bad. There are institutions where you can go and meet from a cleaner to the chancellor same day -- sure a good choice for cooperation.

Enabling environments do not only come from governments but from the mass mentality of people. These two, when wrong and having wrong tendencies, do not only scare foreign investors, but they do scare their own citizens who begin to see the world as one global space. If action is difficult here, I will go where action is enabling and encouraged.

Money and know-how only pull on their greatest worth when infrastructure and mentalities are enabling, no matter to what degree, keeping aside absolutes.

One driving force I learnt after graduating from a university in Cameroon and continuing in Europe was to routinely tool up myself in tools and skills our curricula missed out! And there are many. It has been a routine duty to report some on some university networks of Cameroon, but lecturers of such universities as well as ex-students are in denial -- they think you are condescening when you say the truth.

You indicate our curriculum is the problem. From experience, I think it is not the problem. You may have in many departments in Cameroon universities similar curricula as you have elsewhere. The curriculum may be straight, but self-corruption and unwillingness of the leaders (be they students or lecturers) to empower themselves with knowledge can be a problem.
I choose one area here that follows the typical cycle of good curriculum, poor execution, employment of French expartriates in areas we did not execute & lazy conspiracy theory of Francophone Africans on France colonizing them till today.
If one were to look out and say, hey students in the West do economics, econometrics or finance with computer programming languages (e.g. S or R, SAS, SAP, Oracle etc) and universities in Cameroon still do it with a casio calculator and of very low standard, those target groups will become your enemies. Then when French experts who graduate from their ENAM or unis and have those skills, which our own ENAM & uni graduates do not have, come to HELP on skills we have refused to acquire, we hold on the lazy reciting of conspiracies theories of neocolonization. A blame loop starts and becomes infinite making the initiate to take all for granted, even life.
When the University of Buea opened doors for instance, the programs and the visions were great. Many who had gone to the West for education bought in to support the university in its vision and finance. Eventually, the worth of programs were watered down by the executors.  For instance a computer science class started in 1993 with every intention to have practicals. Practicals started with an outdated Turbo Pascal program, then the who intention of practicals would be scrapped before the semester finished. Elsewhere, high school students were already versed in such skills. Some other universities newly created would go on for long to play politics on trinkets forgetting about how to make a good university.

The  one truth about studies that teach people to make and innovate is that they cannot go without practical components. And all departments from English language to math need laboratories; some do not yet have in our system. Many of our programs in such domains go for too long without practicals. However, it is a fact of principle that we use practicals to learn, fail in learning and learning again how not to fail in every domain in life we come to master. That begins with us as children learning to speak, walk and playing with toys and gadgets.

At this level of a child you mix white, black and asian together, their challenges of learning to speak, walk and play logical instances with their environment is the same. Then a gap sets in when education begins. Therefore there are things we are not doing with our education.
Back to practicals, the systems that work see the teaching of students going along with practicals and research. Our systems keep out practicals and research. And it is not Paul Biya nor the constitution of Cameroon that ask the majority of departments to keep out these things. I guess it is more self complacency and refusal to see how the worls is out there. For records, for 90% of the time, the best students from universities and secondary schools in Cameroon have been coming from the sciences. The cliché has been that science has one answer, a suggestion of the non-initiated. For the initiated, they may have met one math problem in life having more than 3 logical answers, all correct. The truth is the science departments have more learning tools, even if not state-of-the-art, over other departments. At university level, biochemistry has consistently featured in the top 5% of subjects with best performing students. A casual observer will also notice in Yaounde, Buea or Douala that the labs of this department are better equipped, and state-of-the-art in certain instances, and may be a point to drive home the correlation between performance and tools.
A student leaving some of such departments in Cameroon to work in the West immediately starts working the next day with a learning curve of less than a week; students from other departments may have a learning curve of years to adapt.

Now it is a challenge to the lecturers or professors what kind of students they prepare: those who are competitive in Cameroon because they have aunts, uncles and relationships, and would have a hard time transferring and using their skills in the world; or those who land anywhere in the world, with Cameroon being a subset, ready to use universal tools and skills for practical solutions.
Education has for long being about literacy in subjects and not about the skills, tools and capabilities students are to acquire. As such in Africa many universities have been serving as a buffer to hold down teenagers and those in their early teens, who can be "dangerous" to systems, and not to give them skills and tool sets to use to transform the world. To make a fake thing look like real, the curriculum looks almost the same, but the content differs as night and day. And those who make it differ are the very ones meant to execute, and not a certain political will!
We therefore produce engineers who cannot hold a spanner or who cannot design a speed bump. We produce economics graduates who understand only the grammar of economics and not the figures or simulation of possible models using advanced programming or math skills. And the list can go on!