Dr. Nick Ngwanyam makes an anatomy of the Youths’ Problems in Cameroon, President Biya’s address to the Youths, and challenges Adults to Sit up and chart a better way for the Youths.

This interview is Courtesy of CRTV’s 60m program with Wain Paul Ngam

Today we will be focusing on young people, the future leaders of Cameroon who on February 11, 2015 commemorated the 49^th edition of the National Youth Day. One Wiseman has said that the danger that confronts the younger generation is the example set by the older generation. Are we even conscious of the fact that we need to set examples for the younger generation, and what kind of examples? That is one of the issues Dr. Nick Ngwanyam would be addressing in today’s interview.

When I keep reminding myself that I am a youth, it gives me the energy to work. I am getting on to 59 and if I am still a youth that is fine.

Talk to me about your days as a young person. You are still a youth as you have said, but there was a time when you were an active young person.

In fact when I say I am a youth, it is just for the sake of joking. When you are beyond 40, you are no longer a youth. I think it is understood that you should go to school and get all your capacities put in place so that by the time you are 24,25, you start working. So we expect the youth to start working from the time they are 24, 25. They should start making money, they should start putting in place their companies, businesses and investments so that by the time they are forty, they should see clearly what they were doing. They would have been married with two or three kids and have a sense of direction so that when they are fifty, they should actually be retiring from active work.

When you say retire, it does not mean you go to the village, that is you change that kind of activity which must have been strenuous then you redefine something else and you start working at a different pace when you are fifty. You probably go to school and learn different skills and you start doing something in a more relaxed way. So many people get at fifty when they are not yet married because of the lost opportunity.

At what age would you like a young person to start behaving like an old person?

I do not know what you mean by an old person behaving like an old person. I would imagine you want to say at what age should a youth start being responsible. You are assuming that old age comes with wisdom and responsibility and in Cameroon, you would found out that they are some people who are very young and very responsible and yet there are some people who are very old and very irresponsible. So old age in Cameroon does not equate to wisdom and that is a huge problem because a lot of young people have been looking up to people who are older hoping that they have wisdom. These are people who do not have wisdom and this is the reason why our youths are disturbed and lost.

Disturbed and lost because of you yesterday’s youth do not want to probably bring them up. you want to eat the gizzards forever.

The problem here is that we do not know how to hand over the baton. Life is a relay and the way God made us, we are made in batches and we sit on this conveyor belt that goes from one station to the other. life is like entering a train from and you are heading up to Ngoundere and you have to be moving. You cannot enter a train in Douala and when you are getting to Yaoundé, you move back to Edea. That is what we have been doing in Cameroon. When do not want to move along with the train and get to Ngoundere. So we keep looking for a reason not to advance and in so doing, you are causing obstruction in the system. Along that train journey, there are different benefits. When you are in Ngoundal, you probably eat soya and fresh meat, when you get to Ngoundere, you eat something else. Some people like to stay on the tract where there is honey and they keep sucking the honey and realize that they are growing old in the same place. They ought to move on so that others can have a place along the chain. Again I think even if we look at it so simplistically, it does not solve our problem.  In a real place that is developed, it is not a position that somebody gives you, you are the one who generates your own revenue and contribute something to nature because of your kind of work. as we kept saying for many years, the kind of education we have in Cameroon has been a useless kind of education which does not allow people to be able to do things for themselves. We all look only for a government position, a white collar job where we can earn money that we did not work for, where we can lazy around and get paid at the end of the month. People just sit tied to be able to earn money that they did not work for. But if you train as an engineer and went and had a construction company, doing your own business and having your own money, what can tire you is probably is that you stop running around. You must have been grooming your own children who would come and take over the business. That is how things work. But the case in Cameroon is very pathetic because everybody goes and learns these subjects and you cannot be employed anywhere else except in a government office. Therefore, we sit tied in government offices and create problems. The offices are full now and the things are breaking, that is why we face the problems now. I think the president was talking about that and I would say here and now that there is no job in the civil service, government does not give jobs. We have to accept that and change.

Well, I started by wishing you happy youth day and it looks like you the elders, you only wait for such a day to start talking about young people and even try to articulate their problems. How often do elders in Cameroon gather young people to talk to them about tomorrow?

We have a problem with management in Cameroon. We have a huge problem with our managers. I do not know, they could be directors, ministers but we are not proactive. We just go from day to day, that is what is called navigation en vue. In real management, you have to identify a problem, understand the problem, understand the root causes of the problem and plan the solution. Solutions to problems are planned where you come up with short, mid and long term solutions. In our own way, we keep looking at short term solutions. We do not lay long term plans so that the problem gets solved at the roots. Therefore, we have 365 days in a year, then you jump on the streets with few people in T-shirt and you start making some noises and retreat into your cocoon. So we keep having this hit and run attitude and nobody does something for the youths, nothing concrete about the youths. It is on youth day that we come out and shout about the youths. We do not find out what exactly we are doing for our youths. If we have been finding out what we are doing for our youths, if we were doing a comparative study and comparing them with the youths from German universities, Israeli Universities, South African Universities, and South Korean Universities, we would have found out that our own youths are not up to the task. If we take 10000 youths that have graduated from Cameroonian Universities, CUSS, polytechnics, the histories and geographies, whatever put together , then we take 10000 youths graduating from S.Korean Universities “tout tendence confondues” as you say in French; and we compare what these youths can do. That is their understanding of how things work, can they make things work? You design a questionnaire like that and put them to a test, you would discover that while S. Korean student are able to make smart phones, our own youths can only tie “bobolo.” So there is a huge problem. As long as you can come to the conclusion your own youths are good at nothing but making “bobolo,” you would put in mechanism to solve that problem. As long as they are making bobolo here, the world is not going to stop because Cameroonian youths can only make bobolo. No the world continues and things get even more complicated.  We are in a global environment and there are global opportunities and when it comes to sharing global opportunities, too bad for you. When there is a bridge to be built over the Wouri, it calls for technology and if Cameroonian youths cannot build then, you are going to bring in S. Koreans or Chinese youths to build it period. That is global, if you cannot build then somebody would come and do it for you and get paid while your own youths are sitting in the house basking or drinking alcohol at 7am. There is a road that is going to be done between Yaoundé and Douala, how much money is the government going to spend on it. That money is going to go to the Chinese. This is the kind of things we are talking about.

Is it that the elders are afraid to address the concerns of the young people or it is just greed? They do not want those young people to eye their places tomorrow.

It is multi factorial. You can say that many of the people who are supposed to have been given a sense of direction in themselves do not even know the direction. When you do not really know we are supposed to be going to, you can’t ask people to do that.  Most of our leaders do not have an open mind. They have not gone to trade fairs abroad to see what people are really doing. They have never really asked themselves the question what we are up to. We think that just because we have ten state universities and private universities and we are churning out thousands of students, our measure of success is numbers no, it is not.  Our measure of success is the capacity to do things and solve problems. If we were to count numbers and compare numbers with other countries, we would think we are doing very well, we are not. But if you ask the capacity to do things then you would realize that we are next to nothing. Our leaders should know that it is more about capacities not numbers. You would realize that when government gave out 25 thousand jobs two to three years ago, those jobs targeted technicians. Inasmuch as we have 500thousand youths in Cameroon who have certificate without jobs, some of those twenty five thousand jobs were never given out because there was nobody qualified to take them because there were technical jobs. As I speak to you, if you go to look at the pattern of employment in the technical fields in the country, most of those jobs are filled by the Bamileke not Anglophones. Anglophones have certificates in their pockets; those certificates cannot open doors for them.   So the bamilike in the whole country are the once who many years realized that the kind of education their children should have should be tailored and that is why they are getting the jobs.  

You said a while ago that if I compare ten thousand youths leaving our universities in Cameroon with those leaving abroad; amongst those leaving abroad they are Cameroonians. Is it possible for you the elders to create a forum of interaction between those who leaving our universities in Cameroon and other Cameroonians who have studied in Germany, S.Korea and others?

When we use the word abroad, let us be careful what we mean by abroad because someone goes to Mali, he is still abroad, if he or she goes to Central Africa or Chad, he or she is still abroad. These are people who are not better than us in anywhere. When we are talking of abroad here, we should be talking of countries that have emerged. We are talking of the highly industrialized countries. We are thinking of Germany, America and Canada. Then we have countries that have just newly emerged and are doing technologically well. We are talking of India, China, Mexico, Brazil, S Korea. But countries like China and India have problems in the sense that they are advancing a lot but because they have a very large population, even the little that they produce would not go round, so they are more like third world countries but in reality they have really advanced. If you just focus your eyes on what they can produce, you will see that they are well ahead of us and the best example amongst all of them is S Korea. S Korea has a peculiarity that their ruling class knows what they are doing, their universities know what they are doing and their students know what they are doing. It is a multi-factorial thing. Everybody has to be part of the success story. In Cameroon we have come to think that when the president says something, they happen. The only person that said things and they happened was Jesus Christ or God the Father where he created things just by speaking the word. But with human beings we are also called to speak the word because when we speak the word, it goes into the spirit world. It also focuses our minds on what we should be doing. You cannot speak the word and go to sleep. When you speak the word, you follow the word with concrete planning and concrete action then it yield results. What I am saying is, if the president spoke the word on our educational sector and we as adults, we follow up on that and change our curricular, change the way we think, our school system, our books and our mindset and follow up on that else if we still drink, use the same notes of the sixties, we would get it all wrong.

We are going to come back to what the head of State said but my question is, is it possible that the young people without even depending on you the elders since you do not want to take good care of them, depend only on their peers, those who are coming from universities abroad?

Yes, there is something. What we need to realize is the fact that the world is a dynamic system. It is not static. There are a lot of job opportunities in America, Germany, France, Belgium and all these places. Many of our youths left our universities or high schools and went to those places and many of them who were very intelligent, they studied the technological things. What has happened is, there is also an economic squeeze in those countries and the tendency would be for those youths to begin to come back to Cameroon to set up businesses. There are more opportunities for growth in Cameroon and other third world countries than they are out there. If you studied out there as an engineer let us say in road construction, it is easier to build a road here in Cameroon than to build it out there because all our roads are not built. You can come here and buy some old caterpillar and start a road construction company. You cannot go and start a road construction company in America; you do not have the opportunity. You cannot do it in Germany; you do not have the opportunity. We have the opportunity for growth here but unfortunately, the youths who are coming back to Cameroon and start up things like these to help are really frustrated. I think we would find time to address this in another issue because I am leaving it. I know the frustration that I got before I could do what I am doing, the frustrations that my children are going through to be able to come up with companies or do something. I know the frustrations that many people are going through. The government has to address these frustrations otherwise we would be in a real mess.

You are talking about frustration of the young people who have studied out there when they come. It seems like they do not have the patience. They do not want to persevere because many of them come here and once there are obstacles on their way, they rush back.

This is it. The adults are supposed to lay a red carpet for youths. You cannot lay a red carpet for all youths. God has laid a red carpet already for all of us. You need to develop your capacity and have a certain sense of responsibility to walk on that red carpet. The red carpet is not for everybody. It is for those that are prepared. You know in the bible where Jesus gave this parable of a man who had a wedding dinner and got specific people to come to the dinner. They kept giving excuses and went away. Then he sent his servant to go and bring about everybody who was in the street to come in for the dinner. In the course of the dinner, the landlord shows up and says, this man how did you get in, you do not have the wedding gown. That wedding gown is that lack of preparedness. So a dinner would be laid for you, if you do not have the wedding gown, you cannot be part of it. God has laid a red carpet for us but you must develop your capacity to eat of that blessing. So government, adults we are supposed to lay carpets for our youths but you cannot walk on that red carpet except you merit it. So you get access to the red carpet through merit and truth. What has been happening in Cameroon is, we have been putting on the red carpet to people who do not merit it. When you go on the red carpet and you try to walk on it when you do not have the capacity and merit, then when you become an adult you do not know how to lay a red carpet for the young ones. Then you are a fake. That is the problem.  When there is no merit and there is no truth, then the whole system becomes confused. Nature in itself never gets confused but you can become confused until when you get your bag to the wall like Cameroon has gotten its back to the wall with thousands of youth on the street that are rebelling and have no future. When you get to that moment, then you would know what to do with the youths. I guess we are going to do it and we have started to do it. Professional education, you have to train them in character, and you have to give them the opportunity to be able to express themselves at the right time. If a youth is suppose to be working he has to have been trained properly so that when he is 23,24, he has all the skills. If you keep your own youth until he gets to forty before you start training him, then there is waste of time and something is wrong.

Elders in Cameroon expect the young people to get something out of them, to copy from them and to imitate them.

Very few people in Cameroon are worth being imitated because our system of education taught them the wrong thing. If they knew the right thing, the question is why don’t they implement the right thing then? At moment like this, this country needs what I call cross pollination. We need to look outside the boundaries of Cameroon and copy the example of people who have been doing it well. Keep our eyes on people who have made it and ask the question how did they do it? If you ask me, who should we keep our eyes on? Watch S Korea. That is what you should keep your eyes on. If you keep your eyes on Cameroon, you will never get it. In Cameroon we have a lot of “faymen” who make money the wrong way. Our youths have been copying how to make money the wrong way. That is why “419” is popular amongst the youths. I get scammed I do not know how many times a week. Sometimes I catch the scammers, sometimes I do not. Sometimes they take one mile down the road, sometimes eight mile. Scamming has become a way of life and most of our youths who are doing well so to speak just go out there to scamp people instead of working and earning a good living. So Cameroon on that basis, we have youths who are known more on scamming than anything else. Our youths have been taught to just love money for the sake of money. How to get the money is not important. That is why there is so much crime and everything is wrong. So we must teach our children how to earn money and earn it the right way by doing something useful. These days just earning money by being a civil servant is not the right thing. Earn money by producing something that you can show, that is what the president was talking about.

There are very few people the youths can look up to in Cameroon. Sometimes we have the impression that there are some people who have what it takes to help bring up the young people but they are not prepared, they do not have the time. What is happening? Is it that they themselves were not well brought up by the elders at the time?

I do not know what is going on but I think the burden still lies with the president. If the president wants it corrected it would be corrected. So the burden still goes to the president who must put the right people in the right place to do the job and there must come a time when you hit the table to see things done.

You can hit the table in Yaoundé but there are people in Bamenda who will not follow what he is saying.

When you put the right people in the right places and they know what to do, it is all about discipline. Knowing what road to travel, knowing what to do and being disciplined that you do it in time, yield fruits and be efficient in yielding fruits. This is what we need. If we have one, two or three people in Cameroon like that it can still be done.

This idea of the right people in right places, it seems to me that we have very few right people in Cameroon.

I watch Minister Ousman Mey, and he is worth twenty other ministers. So it is about character, it is about quality. It has to do with quality not numbers. You do not need a full house to get it. Like someone said, you do not need a crowd to change a country; you need just a handful of people who know what it takes to change a country.

Well, we are talking here about young people. Maybe we should find out from you whether Cameroonians are taking time in their own homes to bring out those children whom tomorrow will be calling young people? Are they making the effort to make sure that many young people who maybe causing problems tomorrow are well brought up?

It is a huge problem and I think it is time to say that we have to watch our families. The family is the building bloc of society. If you are going to have families where the mother might be married but what if she was at the university, she got sexually transmitted marks. You see that and we have all agreed that many of our youths get sexually transmitted marks. These youth tomorrow would become housewives and so on. If you have a mother who has a master’s degree and does not know how to write a letter because she got sexually transmitted marks, then of course, her own offspring cannot know their right from their left. When you have parent of today who were kids of yesterday and were badly nurtured yesterday, they cannot nurture their own kids of today and a bad situation becomes worse. So it is just very sad.

Like we said in the beginning, sometimes we wait for the 11 of February to begin talking about the youths and their problems. Now in Cameroon, they have decided to be launching the Youth Week as they call it in a given locality. 2015, it was launch in Bafut very close to Bamenda. I imagine that either you were there or you observed through the media what transpired there. Were you impressed?

I went to Bafut, actually I drove there and I am glad I went there. It was a great occasion. Many people turn up and there were a lot of speeches as usual. There were dancing and eating and merrymaking as usual. There were a few wheelbarrows, spades and boats that were shared out but I did not stay until the sharing. It could still be part of a celebration. But do we mean it when we come out to match to support this idea or that. You can do something in the way that is sustainable or you can still do it just to keep the law. Celebration for Cameroonians is something that has been going on for a long time. We only celebrate but do we take things to heart. I am CPDM you know but what I noticed there which I did not like was the fact that, we were celebrating the Youth Day; I expected the youths to come to the forefront and not the party. When the party comes to the forefront, there is this cloud that comes between the youths and the message. So, we want to achieve something but we always bring a veil that covers things. You see, it was not a youth day for CPDM only. If we had wanted it to be a party affair, then we would have made an announcement that the NUDP, SDF and other party youths to come in their party colors. Then we would say that these are youths we are also grooming in party activities because do not forget we have people in political power today and politics must continue. We and bring them together and groom them so that tomorrow even though they are from different political party, they can work in harmony so that the country stays together. When we do not do that, it looks like we are high jacking a situation which is not good. It comes a time when we need to leave the youth alone from politics. It causes confusion. I wanted to see more of the Cameroon National Youth council coming to the front and leading all these youths and passing all these messages so that we realize that success in Cameroon is not according to political lines. And begin to preach the kind of messages about work, discipline, honesty, prayer, love, sharing, giving and the respect of the environment. These are the kind of things we should be talking about to our youths. Telling them to be committed to their education and telling them that Boko Haram is not good. These are the kind of messages and we should mean it. When you bring a political cloud around the youth day, it causes confusion in the young people’s minds.

I imagine that in Bafut there were many children from the nursery schools maybe up to the university. Did you come away with the impression that the minister was talking to those we are calling young people today?

Sometimes I am crazy in my thoughts. Let us say we are launching the youth week and we are at the Commercial Avenue at the grandstand, I would come and the governor and his etats major with all those colonels would be moved to the second roll. I will pick youths from the crowd from primary schools and secondary schools clean or unclean, I would line them at the front there because they are the masters. The youth week is about those masters. I would line them in front there, sit behind with the others and support them. Make the cameras focused on those youths not on me. So that we begin to psychologically see that that is what it is all about, it is those youths and noting else. Whatever we do is about those youths.  I still get the impression that the youths are used as a smokescreen when we are doing our own agenda.

 Since you have imagined that you are the minister, let us imagine that you are the minister for youth affairs. Who would write your speech for the occasion; a young person who masters the young people’s problems or your private secretary?

In fact even before we go to that, let us paint the whole thing again. You know we have so many ministries in Cameroon and there is a lot of duplication and a lot of things that are not going right. Let look at the youths, we have about four, five Ministers in charge of youths. So those ministers are confused in their functions and they end up confusing the youths. Because they are so many of them, everybody is trying to sell his own agenda and in selling their own agenda, the youths are lost. We have the minister of Basic Education, Secondary Education, Technical Education, Higher Education, Youth affairs, Sports and Physical Education all in charge of youths. So we have five ministries in charge of youths doing the same thing. Then we have a minister in charge of professional education, Minister of Culture which is basically in charge of the youths. So our molding blocs are the youths but we have all very crafty hands and trying to mold something out of that clay. Because we have not sat down and thought it out how that clay should be molded, at the end we spent twenty years and there is no youth to show. We have a problem there, might be I am lost in my thoughts now but what I am saying is that there is some craziness in the whole thing that does not make sense.

Who would right your speech, Mr. Minister of youth affairs?

Nobody, should I tell you something, you know I used to write a lot in the Chronicle Newspaper and the Guardian Post and so on. Sometimes an interview as what we are having would be transcribed and printed in the newspaper. That is a different thing. When I am sitting alone sometimes I write an article, it might be three or four pages and it is published in the Guardian Post or Chronicle, it looks like a dialogue. They would say, for instance interviewed by the chronicle, no it is not. It is a monologue; I am asking the questions and answering them. In it, I am trying to solve a problem or trying to teach the community something. So to be very specific with you, if I were the minister of or even the president, I would write my on speech.

Are you sure that you would master all the problems of the young people?

You would not master all the problems but have a listening ear and get the range of issues and identify what the problems are. Get to the roots of those problems. That is what is important.

Going back to what happened in Bafut; you said there were farm tools on display and you left before they were distributed. You had the impression that they were to be distributed to the young people who needed them?

Those farm tools and everything were symbolic, they were like communion. Those farms tools, they spread very thin because of the population; maybe one spade or one cutlass to whomever. But those farm tools were not what the youth needed. What those children need is first, build up their mindset to proper thinking. What should they think about agriculture? Give agriculture a value. Help them see this industrial farming. Before I became a medical doctor, I wanted to be an agric officer. I first went to college at JMBC and we had this File C farm. I do not know what file c stood for but it was an agricultural club. I remember I had one of the best ridges in school. In forms one, two I grew lettuce and so on. I had a particular interest and love for agriculture. You first have to bring that mindset to the youths, let them have the love for agriculture. Let them see that agriculture pays. Let them see that you can make a living out of agriculture. But if they see that their parent toiling day in day out and are getting nothing out of it, they would bring some hoes and give them, they would never use those hoes. So we have to make people accept what we want mentally and really prove to them that it is worth it, then we can go for it. Talking about agriculture, you would see a lot of directors who are in the ministry of agriculture; you would see delegates in the regions who are in charge of agriculture, delegates in the division who are in charge of agriculture, if we were to put these categories of people together and ask how many of them have farms. I would challenge you if twenty of then have farms. If they do change, you should my name. That is where the problem is.

You say you liked agriculture when you were in secondary school and I imagine that it was the same thing in primary school. If today the teachers in primary school have that love for agriculture and want to teach children, I am afraid it is going to be theoretical because  if you look at most schools, there is no land for agriculture.

You might draw inference from that when you look at schools that are built in urban areas where land is of the essence but if you go to schools in the rural area, agriculture is not serious. It is not given a serious touch. Gardening is not given a serious touch. Where there is a will, there is a way. If agriculture and animal husbandry were part of the curriculum where things are taken seriously, then you would begin to see a real change and improvements all around. Then when we come to big cities like Yaoundé, you could still have schools in the heart of the city but would have demonstration farms as part of their training ground out of the city where there is land. Then they would truck load these students to the farms when it is time for agricultural lessons and bring them back.

You seem to have been blaming the elders so much. Do you think they are conscious of the fact that they have problems?

Many of them are aware that they have problems but I still blame the elders for everything because number one, we have brought them up in our homes, not showing them the right examples. What we have taught them in schools, we have taught them the wrong things so if the youth are misbehaving the blames go to the adults. If we have one hundred youths, five of them might have a sense of direction. Ninety five are lost and out of this ninety five, fifty of them are lost not because of their own making, but because we did not show them the right example.

Should the young people sit and wait for you the elders to do the correction or they on their own, they can start doing something?

Many youths who are sensitive and intelligent enough are trying to do something. In an environment that is not conducive, you can do your farm, plant your corn though if the rain does not fall you are in a mess. So if the environment is not supportive enough then you are in a mess. Let me give you an example, I know this young boy who came from abroad and has been trying to do something and I know how much he has been struggling. Then, he ordered some goods from abroad and the goods came at the Douala port. First he had to raise capital which was not easy. This money was borrowed from the credit union and when you borrow money from the credit union, you pay a very high interest rate on the money and if you are not careful, you start running and they threat mill in the sense that you cannot keep up with their payment and that can wreck you. He takes the money and places and order. It takes a long time because what he placed an order for has to be manufactured. Then it is shipped which is a long process and the ship comes to Douala and there is another long story how the ship cannot dock and how the ship cannot be emptied of their cargo. Then a whole administrative procedure goes in and it looks like in Douala, some ships have preference over the others. So there is this mafia down there, where some ships have to come in and dock and empty their cargo while some are held at sea. I do not know what game they play down there. After all these struggles, his containers come out, then the process of customs inspecting and going through it is another “wahala” as you say in pidgin. Then the containers are finally released and they bring trucks and they pay for the truck that has to carry the container out of the port. As the containers are driving out of the port, some testing other customs officers show up and then they ground the truck. They had paid the man who had the truck just for a few hours to carry the goods. Now the truck was grounded like that for two or three days and he has to pay again. So you see the cost incurred by these young people. The inspector, the senior custom officer finally releases the truck, just as they are about to drive out, some gendarmes shoe from somewhere else and block the road that they have to open the road. So this young people who have come from abroad and are trying to do certain things faces uphill tasks until the feel discourage and go back. The environment is not conducive at all. Mr. President, please make our environment conducive for young people to come back from out there and help your country to develop and create jobs. We are begging you.

When you send such a message to the president, what do you expect him to do because he can from his office talk to his supporters who sing on tree tops that they support him to go ahead and implement what he has said.

That is the problem. People say they are supporting the president. Supporting the president does not mean you should wear the party uniform. Supporting your president is not about leaving your house and going for campaign. True support to the president is when you support him to succeed in his objectives and developing the country, making his people happy, providing jobs for the people. Might be we use to shout a lot. Two years back there were this volumes and volumes of motions of support to the president. They were motions of support to the president that were not backed by action on the ground. If there were backed by action in the ground, we will not be where we are. We come to that point where if you truly want to support the president, do your job.

The president you listen to on the 10^th of February talking to young people, what did you come away with?

The president was restating they way forward for all the youths, all the parents and for everybody. I wish he had come out with this statement ten years ago; we would have been in the position to assess some results now when he is asking youth now to study vocational, engineering and the professional fields. It would take some years and we are looking for a positive change in future maybe after five years. Just because he said it today, it is not going to change next year. If people buy that philosophy and begin to implement, you would see the result in five years. So it is better late than never.

The fact that he is realizing that the education we are following in Cameroon is not helping us develop is a step.

Yes, it is a step but I wonder why it took so long for us to realize that we were doing a wrong thing. If I were the Minister of Higher Education, I would go down there to those ten state universities and I will convert them to 80% of the students would become professionals.

Who would teach them?

For starters, we just have to go out there and import teachers too. If we are depending on teachers and lecturers we have in Cameroon nothing would change. If we have realize that that is a problem, then we have to go out there to Germany, S Korea, America, Canada and go on our knees and beg, then we would have teachers. What do I mean, in Germany for instance, there is a group called SES Bonne (Senior Experts Service Bonne), they have people there who are about sixty years old who have been working in industries and are professional who have retired. They are retired but not tired. I am saying so because I worked with them. If you apply to them, state your needs and provide just a place for them to stay, something to eat, local transportation and an incentive of about 7$ per day or something like they, they are willing to send all these professional to come and enter into all our universities and professional schools. They would pt in the energy and the savoir fair that you need and in the next five years, you will have the professionals that you need that are as good as the ones in S Korea. If you like you can employ ten thousand professors trained in universities in Cameroon, they would only give you what they have which according to what I think is not what we need to develop.

Before the Head of State talked about professional education, we already have many professional schools in Cameroon but we are not feeling the impact of those professional schools.

The concept of professional education was introduced just recently in the ministry of higher education. In fact I was there in the ministry from day one. We started talking seriously about professional education in 2002. Then it matured in 2003/4. This concept of private higher education was started on the Anglophone side by late Hon. John Ngu Foncha. He started it under the concept of INDECO, BUST and all those kinds of things and they were trying to force government to craft a law and a policy to allow private people to train professionals. That is to open up so that the university education could be made better because they could see the lapses and the lacuna in our training system.  Government was slow at doing it. SIANTO started private university long before government could catch up with him. So these are the pioneers who could see the vision and go for it but government was still lurking in the dark. So government was slow at reacting. Things started picking gear in 2004/5 and now we have move into higher gear. I think there are more than 150 private higher institutions that are training professionally. Even with that there is a problem. Government is having it fears because there is something which is going on out there which we need to watch against. For a very long time, Cameroonians have so entice by paper. When I say paper, I mean certificate. Cameroonians like to brandish a certificate which is not backed up by the capacity to do. it is just like the monetary value. When you have a ten thousand francs in the pocket, or when we say that Cameroon have so much money in CFA, it should be backed up by our goods and services. When your money is not backed up by goods and services, then the money becomes cheap and cannot buy anything. In Cameroon, we have fake papers in our pockets. You could actually go to the University of Yaoundé and have a PHD, but the question is the value of your PHD in whatever you studied. Can you compare that with some other person who has a PHD from another university elsewhere? You could have a PHD which has only the worth of a beer. These are the kinds of things and I would say that we still have a problem of standardization because we do not keep to standards. A lot of the private institutions want cheap popularity and what they do is they leak their examination to students so that the students can score a hundred percent. The students end up with degrees that cannot be backed up by savoir fair.