Dr. Nick Ngwanyam's interview continue

We are saying that our thinking has not been good. We have not been thinking our strategies right. We have to rethink the problems and rethink the solutions. For those of you who understand the problem tray, I have gone through this thinking myself and it boils down to the fact that; number one-our educational system is wrong. Number two our attitude to work are wrong, number three we are very selfish, we do not love each other and number four, we are not patriotic. When we begin to correct these things and lay the right foundation, then we can get to 2035. But if we do not start looking at these things eyeball to eyeball, we will never get there.

To talk of the friends of President Paul Biya, were you saying that he has enemies in Bamenda?

Well I am still going to see somebody who does not have enemies. Jesus Christ himself had enemies. If you are a human being and you do not have enemies, then something is wrong with you somewhere. But enemies in themselves are not a bad thing because for those of us who read inspirational books, in fact your enemies make you grow faster than your friends. Your friends are people sometimes who would be telling you lies. When you are naked they would tell you, you are well dressed. Those are bad friends and of course, we should make a distinction between political friends and genuine friends.

Maybe we should understand this friendship very well. Let be put this question to you. Who are those God can call his friends?

If God is going to call you his friend, then you mist be someone who buys into God’s vision and God’s vision is very simple. God created us to love him, praise him, to worship him, to serve him and to work and love each other. If you are able to do these things you are God’s friend. In fact the way it is put in the gospel of Mathew, seek ye first the kingdom of God. Seeking the kingdom of God is by doing all these things and by making sure that you make God your all and all from morning till evening. Nothing distracts you and you live and dwell in the presence of God. You do as God wants you to do. You wear a thinking cap that corresponds to God’s plan for you and your community. It is just as simple as that. It is not about some sacrament. It is about loving God, loving man, loving yourself and doing what God wants you to be doing. When you are facing the stresses of life, keep asking yourself, if Jesus were here what you would advise? If Jesus were in this circumstance, what would you advise?  It is about the mindset. Until now, President Paul Biya saw some people he thought were hos friends. You know all these people who keep shouting you are the greatest without supporting him in action are not true to him. They just come around around, sing songs and write motions of support. That is the wrong way of supporting the president. If you are going to be the friend of the president, you support the president’s ideology by action so that he has results. What results would he have? You would be supporting him in such a way that most youth will get work; we  would create employment in the country and when you are appointed into an office of responsibility, it is by working so that when he comes to take stock, you would have something to show. It would be about having two talents. The president would give you two talents and when he comes to assess after some time, you should be able to present him with five talents. But in Cameroon, he would give somebody two talents, instead of somebody working on the two talents; they would reduce the talents into one talent and then try to cover up by praise singing.

 The issue here is that in such outfits, the members try to position themselves. They want the Head of State to know that some people somewhere are supporting him.

I do not know much about that but the president this time is looking more about output than noise. If you are going to be supporting the president, support your president with action. It is about action and your actions speak louder than words. We use to think that talking on television and just making noise, when you go give some few bags of garri you must take pictures of that to show. All those kind of things do not count. The local [people in your community, can they say that they are better off because you had the opportunity to serve them?

This association, was it going to accommodate the poor?

The association is not about accommodating the poor or the rich. It is about helping people to refocus on their thinking. To follow the president in his ideology and even bring on board those positive things that would make the country grow. Even after the president’s tenure of office, we would still be talking about CAPBIYA. It is more about an ideology. It is not really about the person and an ideology usually lives pass the person. We are talking about the Christian ideology these days, Muslim ideology with Mohamed. These are ideologies that lived passed the person.

When would you guys talk of the friends of the president of the republic?

As of now, he is both the president and the person. Probably you are right but it still refers to the same thing. But when we say friends of President Paul Biya, we are looking at President Paul Biya and what he stands for and trying to see how you can support him wherever you are in the little thing that you are doing so that he succeeds. When we say that “he succeeds,” it is actually not him but so that the country grows. We are going pass him and we are looking at the country and saying that if we change the way we have been doing business, change the way we been doing things and try to modify a few things, the country would do better.

I want to imagine that you have plans to go out there and recruit members by making people to support the policies of the Head of State. Are you sure that some of the members have the moral authority to go out there and recruit members?

You see the best Christian is the one who repents at the eleventh hour. In this thing, we are not saying that some people are so bad that they can not support the president.

But you must repent before you go recruiting

Yes, you must repent before you go recruiting in the sense that you use to think just about yourself, your children and so on.  But now you realize that it is more about the whole nation and all the youths. When you see those children on “bensikin” know that it is your responsibility to help them to be better people tomorrow. Be thinking of what you can do for those children to be better off. When you see a young man who is riding bensikin and he is twenty years old, at forty years would he still be doing the same thing? Own a house? At forty would he be able to look after his own family? It is this kind of global thinking when you try to make sure that your neighbor’s child succeeds. That is what CAPBIYA is all about.

Dr. Ngwanyam, can some body that has not cared about rigor and moralization go out there to talk about the Head of State to somebody?

If you do not want to talk about it- you know people have not cared about rigor and moralization and many of these values, they might find it very difficult to start singing a new son, they can be quite and stop singing the old song and that would help.

I imagine that those you want to recruit as members are the young people

Yes, 2035 is about young people. We do not want to talk about the old any longer. Some of the old are causing as lot of obstruction now. The do not help the youth to think right because they are seeing but the wrong values. If those old people now try and get the new values, then they would be chanting a new song and not the old one.

Would you have a message for most of the young people out there who lack jobs?

The question is they lack jobs but we need to go down there and find out why they lack jobs. They lack jobs because the lack the capacity. And why do they not have the capacity. They do not have the capacity because training in our schools and universities has been wrong. It does not matter how hard the youths try, they can not correct that. It is the government responsibility to correct our educational system so that the youths can study the right thing. I would use this platform to again appeal to the nation and to the authorities that be, that we need to actually change our educational system. it is going to be tough but that is the only way. The other countries are doing well because of this thing that they call DIY-Do It Yourself. It does not matter what you do, if you can not do things yourself, it will never work. Do things yourself as an individual, do things yourself as a nation. If we take our country Cameroon for instance and we call the Chinese to come and build our roads, sports complex, and our water situation; as long as you call people to come and do things for you, you can not get anywhere. As long as your own youths can not do those things for themselves, as long as they can not participate in that technological growth for your nation and contribute in that development of your nation, you would never get anywhere. We have to build the capacities of our youths to be able to solve our own problems ourselves. That is the key. If you ask me how then, I would say that we need to change the curricular in our schools. If you look at the way we study in our schools, the curricular is design around two questions. If you look at the curricular of countries that have emerged, you would see the differences. If you look at the curricular in Cameroon, the people who designed that curricular, they wanted student s to answer questions like when, who, which and what. These questions do not allow for mental development. Nations that have survived ask the other questions. The key questions they ask are why and how. The thing is the child who is listening on me on the radio that should ask the question how the radio works. How can this thing be broadcast in Yaoundé and I am able to receive it in my house? How does it work? How is it happening? Why is the fixed phone not as good as the mobile phone? This is how we should be going about with our education. But if you ask questions like who is the minister of health? Who is the president of Gabon and you are given A ‘Levels. That is not it. We are learning the wrong things. When you begin to ask the why and the how things work, you would begin to realize that these things are group under a group of subjects which I refer to as STEM. That is |Sciences, Technology Engineering Mathematics. If we have a hundred children in the country, we should do it in such a way that 60% of them are studying STEM. 40% can be studying other things. But if you have a country where 95% of the students are studying the wrong thing, the country would never develop.

Can we be talking about the wrong thing or something that is not relevant again?

It is not relevant. You can not build a nation with that kind of thing. It is not correct. It is just that in 1960 when we just got our independence and we started putting structures in place, the Whiteman who understood what we should be studying did not tell us the secrete. 

Still talking about the young people, you intend to preach equal opportunities for all the young people…

Equal opportunity is not preaching. You have to do it. You have to provide equal opportunities for all children. What do I mean by equal opportunity? When I look at it critically, I am sure that we can prove it by doing some studies. If you go to some schools, the school of engineering, the school of medicine, you would realize that it is mostly the children of the big people who are in this schools. The children of the poor are not really there and there is no even distribution over the national territory. So there is something wrong in the selection and we are saying that there should be equal opportunity for all either you are poor or rich, an orphan or not, it should not matter. What should matter should be your character and your level of intelligence and your commitment to serve the nation and to serve humanity. When we get these things right, the right people would begin to come up and we build our nation.

Certainly you would have an uphill task. You would be talking to the employed and unemployed youths. Those who are employed were not employed because they were very intelligent.

That is correct. We are talking of those who have been employed, where have they been employed and how useful are they? If you do a critical study and you begin to find out the out put of those that have been employed, you would agree with me that the civil servant in Cameroon do not really work much. If you were to quantify their work in relation to what is done in other countries and do a comparative study, you would realize that in Cameroon we do not really work. We can not define work and we do not really know what work is. We do nothing and we get paid for it.

I am talking about people who at the end of the take a salary

Yes, you are talking about a set of people to whom we distribute salaries without work. We have a bunch of people on the list to whom we distribute salaries without work.

But those who are receiving do not do anything extra

That is an example of a bad system and that is why we are saying that we should correct that and begin to put the right persons in the right places. If we continue to do it the way we have been doing, we would get to no way. Let me put it in more concrete terms. Let suppose that the government were to create 600000 jobs in the civil service and we just gather more youths and put them on the pay roll, Cameroon would only get worst and poorer. That would not be a solution. When we are talking about work and employment, there is something that we should try to explain here. Work in the nation is found in the civil service and in the private sector. When you go to the private sector, you have the informal sector. It is actually the private sector and the informal sectors that generate a lot of jobs in the country. It is not about the civil service. When you talk about work in Cameroon and the under developed countries, everybody is looking at the civil service. That is not the right place to look for work. So if we are not having jobs in Cameroon, it is because that private sector has not been developed. That private sector is not just developed by a presidential decree. It is developed by doing something concrete and that is why do it yourself becomes very important. That is why STEM becomes very important. When you learn how to do these things then you can create your own job. You can add value to things and the wood that we are selling now must have been converted into very beautiful furniture and done with before selling. That is a lot of money. If we were doing it ourselves, then we would not be importing rice from china. These are the kinds of things I am talking about. We have a lot of potentials but we have not developed because of our poor training.

Can young people who have receive the right education be counted on if they are not discipline and honest?

No, there are a bunch of things that go together. Your capacity and your aptitude and attitude are very important. Aptitude is all that you have acquired in school, your training and what ever. Now attitude is your character. Your success depends very much on your character. It constitutes 75% of your success. But even if you are the best guy in town and your aptitude is not much, you would not be able to solve any problem.   So your aptitude or your training is that capacity to be able to solve problems. Then, when you have that knowledge, the skills and the training and you are well behaved, that is honesty, responsibility, integrity, accountability, creativity, and you bring them together and add to your capacity, it causes an explosion. You become very productive and everything that you touch would multiply.  You would be rich and create jobs for others. That is the kind of thing and therefore CAPBIYA want to take the youths in this direction.

Is it possible for us to have the young people who have received the right kind of education, disciplined, honest just by deciding to be honest, and disciplined without the elders pushing them a bit?

That is why we are saying that it is a collective effort where the elders, the youths and everybody has got to understand what we have to do now to come out of our mess. You are not doing it just for the sake of your family; we are doing it for the sake of the nation. We are doing it for the sake of our collective good because we have realized that if we do not do this, we are going to perish as a nation. We have no choice whether we like it or not, we got to do it.

Is it that sometimes the elders are afraid of the young people to push them a bit to be honest and disciplined?

Many of the elders you have seen especially in politics and so on have been showing the wrong example and there is very little we can do. As we say, action speaks louder than words.

 I know there are some neighborhoods in Bamenda where you live, when you see young people spend the whole day and night playing music, dancing, drinking and causing atrocities and nobody says anything.

Yea, nobody says anything because we have left it drift so much that nobody knows that right thing. So this is the bell we are ringing here to say, we have got to change and stop what we are doing. Change and take it from a different angle.

Can these friends of President Paul Biya help the young people who today are accused of scamming?    You know scammers?

 Yes I do. I have been scammed for a couple of times myself. When we say friends of President Paul Biya, no one is going to come to you like a gendarme to force you. Friends of President Paul Biya is a philosophy and when we are talking on the radio now we are actually educating the nation. We are saying look young men and women; we have to start thinking differently. We have to start working differently so that we can reap a different fruit.  If we continue to harvest of the old tree that is what we are going to continue to reap for the next one hundred years and until we sow a new tree now, we are going to be reaping the rotten fruit.

You plan to help in the transfer of technology. That is the key. How do you intend to achieve that?

I noticed something. I as Dr. Ngwanyam I have been thinking a lot about technology and I started to articulate in that area. I tried to bring some technology on board to Cameroon but when I came with the technology especially in the medical field, many of my colleagues were not responsive to technology. You would understand that even now in Cameroon we have a lot of directors in the officers who depend on their secretaries to open the internet for them. We are still afraid of technology so we have to crate an enabling environment where the young people start being introduced to technology at young ages. Technology is a very exciting thing and if you try to take technology to people who are old, you will not get it. We should introduce technology in our primary schools, secondary schools and university and we begin to show people a new way of doing things. You know of course that these guys who draw plans of houses, they use to do that with a pen and a ruler and so on. These days they use a computer. I was listening to a custom officer over the radio from Douala and he was talking about what the scanner has done for them and how it has improved on their work at the port.

It means that we have to go out there, acquire the technology and come back

That is correct. We really have to change our priorities. It is very unfortunate; we have about five thousand professors and lecturers in our universities. There are just about one thousand five hundred full professors. But what I would say is that all these professors that we have are the professors of the old stock. If we continue to work only with the professors of the old stock, we will only reproduce the same result. What is the result we have been getting from these professors? If we say that all our children train in these universities are not productive, then what we are saying that all what the professors are transmitting is not productive. Therefore, we have to correct the professors, correct the students. Correct the curriculum, correct the vision, correct the thinking and correct everything. If we do not do that and we keep talking about it, it would not work. The best way to correct it is to get up, sit up and begin to ask for technical help from outside.

When you talk of transfer of transfer of technology, people think that you are talking about young people going out there to acquire the technology and come back.

There are different ways of transferring technology. Even as we speak I would say that this nation has lost a lot in terms of man power. I do not know what obtains these days but in our days the state of Cameroon was giving scholarship for young people who did very well at the GCE and the BAC to go out there and study. Even as we speak, I know that many countries still give scholarships to our young people to study. But these our young people who went out many years ago and studies high tech remained there because the country was not receiving them back. The country did not create a platform for them to come back and reproduce what they have learnt. The country did not do that. Some people who were coming from abroad seem to be a threat to those who were sitting in offices and the rather created bottleneck to frustrate them. So there has been no dialogue between our children in the diaspora and those of us who are here. It is time to say that all our young children who are in the diaspora who are well trained to come back. It time for us to create a favorable environment for them to come back.

I was going to ask how you and your friends of President Paul Biya intend to bring back those guys. If you send them out there to go and acquire technology, you should be prepared to give them the space.

Yes, you have to give them the space to function. You have to create that enabling environment. To do that, we can not talk about it now. There are ways and means of doing it. Cameroon is one nation in which internet is very expensive. I do not know why but there are many African countries where internet is not all that expensive. At this material moment I think and I believe that we can get internet to our primary and secondary schools free of charge and charge just a little for our universities so that children should learn very fast. We can bring computers into the country and make computer education cheap and affordable. Take electricity every where and begin to see things happen. We can take our television and radio everywhere and begin to use them for teaching not just for dancing.

Members of CAPBIYA intend to tell him the truth always. Can you succeed?

I think telling the truth is a good thing. I read about the truth and I read about something called the white lie. The truth is good and it is most ideal to tell the truth always. But even a bishop would tell a white lie sometimes. For instant if a woman came and had a confession with the bishop and says, “Bishop Look, I messed up this way.” The Bishop is not going to tell the husband because that is the truth. This is a little bit of a white lie. You can tell a white lie which can be justified but if lying is your modus operandi, you have failed the nation.

Does God accept white lies?

 I do not know about this but I am sure it is for debate. The fewer lies you tell the better it will be. But I also understand that if you tell the truth always sometimes you can create more problems. I think we tell ore lies than we tell the truth which is not helpful.

By having this as one of your policies, to tell the president the truth always, you are giving the impression that in the past he was told lies.

If you go by the statistics of those that a locked in Kondengui who were his close collaborators, then the report they were giving him were false and that is why they are there. I am not the one saying it. You are the one saying that. In fact they were lying that is why they are there. They were lying and that is why our country is not growing. If you do not have work, it is because our curriculum is a lie. Everything we are doing in Cameroon is a lie. What is the truth actually? It is when you do God’s will. Have we ever asked what God’s will for our nation is? Have we ever asked what God’s will for our family is, for us as individuals? Work and think according to God’s plan for your life. If we are 20million of us and all of us were working according to God’s plan then at the end we will not be in the mess in which we are. Most people would not know who God is but when boko haram is around we learn to pray.