Ernest Sumelong
25 February 2008
He is Dr. George Ngwa, South African based United Nations Population Fund Regional Adviser. As a very young journalist, he covered State House under the late President Ahmadou Ahidjo. Today, in an exclusive interview with The Post, he assesses the regimes of Ahidjo and his predecessor, Biya. Sampler:"...Ahidjo was extremely patriotic and determined to make Cameroon a devloped country. Every December, like clockwork, civil servants received a salary increase. He made sure to visit each province at least, once a year...(Today) "...Parents can't send their children to school, neither can they pay hospital bills. Civil servants have not had any salary hikes since their pay was slashed by 70% in the early 1990's; worse, corruption and tribalism have been elevated to a mode of governance..."
The Post: You were a household name in journalism in Cameroon, especially as a presidential correspondent in the days of late President Ahmadou Ahidjo; you also lectured at the University of Buea where you were Faculty Officer; then you left Cameroon. What took you out of the country?
Dr. Ngwa: Household name? You must be kidding! Well, I have this urge - every four or five years, I have to move up in my career or move out. My first move out of Cameroon in 1983, was for political reasons. My last move in 2001 was due to personal and professional reasons.
After teaching in the University of Buea for seven years, I felt that my friend and colleague Prof. Enoh Tanjong and I had set a firm foundation for the Journalism Programme to take off. There wasn't much new that I could offer. I realised that I was beginning to repeat myself. And I hate routine! In addition, the environment in UB at that time was most stultifying both academically and professionally.
Political partisanship and regional origin were, overtly and covertly, a constant litmus test. Politically neutral lecturers were always suspect. I felt that there was, frankly, no reward worth compromising my independence of thought, expression or action. Some of my senior colleagues were scandalised when, responding to their question why I wasn't eager to build a career in the university, I told them that the only posts in the country which could tickle my fancy were president, prime minister, minister and CEO of a state corporation.
Without sounding irreverent, I felt I could do lots better than most of the then and current occupants of those positions. So, I was looking for new challenges when the opportunity to work for Amnesty International as their spokesperson at headquarters in London cropped up. I spent the next four years in that capacity until I was recruited by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, as its Regional Information Adviser.
That wasn't your first sally from Cameroon...
No. I was compelled to leave the country in August 1983. This was the result of the persecution I was subjected to in the wake of Ahidjo's resignation in November 1982.
As editor-in-chief in the news service of Radio Cameroon, producer of the famed Cameroon
Report and presidential correspondent, I was tasked by hierarchy, along with my French speaking colleagues Jean Claude Ottou and Gerba Mallam, to produce a news magazine programme to mark the passing of the torch from Ahidjo to Biya.
I gathered some of my colleagues - Sam Nuvala Fonkem, Victor Epie Ngome, etc. - for brainstorming on the direction the programme would take and the guests to be invited. We agreed that the programme should be a frank discussion of Ahidjo's legacy and that panelists should include the leaders of Anglophone Cameroon available in Yaounde at the time -
Foncha, Muna, Egbe Tabi, Nzo Ekah-Ngaky, Fonlon. A series of huge problems soon arose. Ekah-Ngaky, claiming he cherished his anonymity, flatly refused to be part of the discussion and was substituted with Mfon Mukete. Prof. Fonlon warned that he'd take control of the discussions because he had a few serious questions to ask the other panelists.
Muna said he'd not sit around the same table with Foncha. So we decided to interview the guests individually, asking them similar or the same questions. I edited these interviews and broadcast them under the title "A Tribute to Ahmadou Ahidjo". Some people thought it was a rather misleading title.
What was the government's reaction to the programme?
It was prompt. I started receiving calls in my office as the programme was being broadcast. Some of the callers were elated by the line of questioning. Others thought we were brazen. I was even advised to go into hiding immediately. By the time it was over, there were two police commissioners from the secret police CND or DIRDOC or CENER, whatever it was called then, waiting for me at the entrance to the broadcast studio.
They "invited" me to accompany them to DIRDOC. The two-week interrogation, including a one-hour session with Jean Fochive, was marked by threats, and "good cop bad cop" tactics. I was lucky not to have been locked up, but was asked to report to DIRDOC daily.
They made sure to accompany me back to the radio house whenever I had to read the news. That way, the public was not alerted to my travails with the dreaded secret police.
At the end of the interrogation, my overall boss, Guillaume Bwele, the then overzealous Minister of Information and Culture, banned me indefinitely from the air. I was not to come within 50 metres of any live microphone! That ban has never been lifted.
To crown it all, I was served with what the Francophones call "Blame". The charge reads better in French: "Blame avec inscription au dossier. Motif - Organisation d'une emission a caractere subversive mettant en cause toutes les institutions de la republique." I was told how lucky I was, because that was tantamount to high treason and I could have been shot or disappeared into Fochive's gulags.
Well, I didn't want to tarry around until somebody changed his mind. I left the country for the USA, where I spent seven years.
What did you learn from the experience?
It gave me a greater understanding of the workings of Cameroon's body politic. Above all, I got to understand very well why Anglophones have ended up with the short end of the stick in this country. The disagreements and enmity between the senior leadership of West Cameroon was worse than disgraceful. It was simply suicidal. Ahidjo certainly relished it.
Mind you, this is still going on today. That is why we continue to be shafted by our Francophone brethren. Remember the old saying: "a house divided cannot stand".
Take us down memory lane and tell us how you became presidential correspondent at the time and maybe share some of your experiences working with President Ahidjo.
A lot of hard work and some luck, I guess. When you look at Cameroon nowadays, it's all about nepotism, tribalism and corruption. You have to know somebody who is well-connected or cough up the money. Merit doesn't cut it. Thirty years ago, when we started as journalists freshly out of school in Yaounde, our careers were guaranteed.
All you had to do was work hard to advance and ensure that no political feathers were ruffled. We were lucky to have mentors such as Sam Nuvala Fonkem, Mark Niboh, etc., to show us the ropes. It took us months before we were judged fit to go on the air, starting with hourly news summaries.
One morning, out of the blues, I was thrown into the deep end. I was asked to provide live coverage of the President's visit to the National Assembly later that morning. I broke into a cold sweat because I knew exactly what the consequences of failure would be.
I gathered my wits and, as they say, the rest is history. Apparently, I did well because after that I was called upon to report on the President's activities at home and abroad. Several times, I was recalled from leave to accompany the head of state. Our last trip abroad was to Spain in October 1982.
You have worked in both the Ahidjo and Biya regimes, can you make some kind of comparison between the two?
It is fashionable nowadays to condemn Ahidjo and his regime. Those who are above 50 and who are in power now are mostly Ahidjo's creation. Ahidjo was extremely patriotic and determined to make Cameroon a developed country. The five-year development plans were veritable blueprints for the country's take off. Cameroonians knew exactly what to expect from government.
Schools, hospitals, industries were being built on a regular basis. Public schools were tuition-free and university students were entitled to monthly stipends. Every December like clockwork, civil servants received a salary increase, with those in the lower echelons receiving more percentage-wise, even at the height of global economic downturns. He made sure to visit each province at least once a year.
There was some kind of ethnic balance in the division of national spoils: the army command and import licences were in the hands of the northerners, retail was the preserve of westerners and the civil service was controlled by the Centre-South. The Anglos controlled nothing. That has changed these days with most of the levers of government and business in the control of one group. The Anglos are still out in the cold.
Now, I don't want to sound as if all was lovey-dovey. The flipside of these achievements was the heinous crimes being committed in the name of building national unity. Individual liberties were severely curtailed. Excessive centralisation ensured that accountability was only to Ahidjo. You served at his pleasure. It was a one-party autocratic system and everything was said and done to glorify the grand camarade and his regime, and to "educate" the people to be more subservient to the party. If you understood that and played by the rules, you had no problems.
As for the Biya regime, it adopted the Ahidjo modus operandi until it was pushed in the early 1990s, kicking and screaming, into granting more freedom for journalists and the public at large. We are told today to be grateful to the president for a nascent democratic space and for the climate of peace in the country, as contrasted with the situation in the sub-region, buffeted as it is by internecine conflict, etc.
But peace does not necessarily mean the absence of war, you know. Cameroon is a highly indebted poor country. Parents can't send their children to school. Neither can they pay hospitable bills. Civil servants have not had any salary hikes, since their pay was slashed by 70% and further devalued by 50% in the early 1990s. Intellectuals and professionals have been devalued in favour of men in uniform.
We are hanging like bats in a world of inverted values. Our icons now are footballers, musicians and con-men (feymen). Worse, corruption and tribalism have been elevated to a mode of governance. Patriotism now means making a beeline for the public till immediately one is appointed to any position of responsibility.
Now, lets go back to the University of Buea. What motivated you and Prof. Enoh Tanjong to push for the creation of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1993?
With the advent of greater freedom of the press in the early 1990s, we realised that the private press was not quite equipped, human resource-wise, to perform the role expected of it by the public. Most of the "pressmen" were untrained journalists. Although they did a commendable job under the circumstances, zeal is not a substitute for knowledge.
It was obvious that the Advanced School of Journalism, ASMAC, a government institution, couldn't fill the void. In over 20 years of existence, it had trained less than 50 Anglophone journalists, almost all working for the government. So our aim was to train multi-purpose journalists who could work both in the public and private media.
The curriculum was tailored in such a way as to give students a firm theoretical grounding in the field and expose them to rudiments of professional practice through a school paper and internships in media houses.
Fourteen to fifteen years after admitting the first batch of journalism students, what is your appreciation of those who are in the field today?
I believe that 14 years down the road, the target we set has been largely met. Former students of the Dept. of JMC can be found in all walks of life today.The media landscape in Cameroon has been greatly affected by their presence in CRTV, STV and many private radio stations and newspapers. I understand that out of 21 candidates recruited by CRTV at one time, 20 were from the University of Buea. The former students are creative and determined. JMC has come a long way, but much still has to be done.
What is your assessment of the media landscape in Cameroon today?
I think Cameroonians continue to appreciate the role they expect the press to play, and by some measure that appreciation continues to grow. But when it comes to how the press is carrying out that role, the public's confidence continues to wane. Some reasons can explain that.
Current journalism practice in Cameroon blurs two fundamentally different things: the prurient invasion of the private lives especially by French language tabloids, and the robust challenging of people and institutions necessarily in the public sphere, with public duties and accountabilities.
After the promising early 1990s when the nascent private press was the de facto extra-parliamentary opposition in the struggle for greater freedoms and democracy, there appears to be some regression in professionalism and a lot of ethical lapses. The press in Cameroon is hobbled by the quest for greater profit margins.
The growing commercial imperatives of media ownership have exposed the weaknesses of the watchdog role of the media. Allied to this is the prevalence of gombo or checkbook journalism. Any story has a price! Then there is intimidation of journalists by bullies in the propaganda wings of governing and opposition parties, who hector, demonize and lie about journalists who ask hard questions of them.
As a result journalists are fast becoming accusers, judges and jurors. Outlandish accusations are often made without a shred of evidence and many articles are shot through with anonymous sources. To some journalists the two concepts of journalism and privacy seem incompatible.
And public perceptions of bias and the partisan divide of the media, appear to be on the rise. This is infused with an age-old scepticism of journalists, their companies and the news media as an institution - less professional, less accurate, less ethical and more inclined to covering up rather than correcting their mistakes.
What makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it. We practice this craft inside concentric rings of duties and obligations: obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community.
And we function under a system of values in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims. We should never forget that our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth. This is ethical practice.
There is a recurrent problem among youths in Cameroon about unemployment. Is it that Cameroonian youths lack initiative or that they are not putting their fingers in the right places?
The onus of creating jobs in any country lies with the government of that country. International organisations can assist governments through advice and funding, but not assume responsibility for job creation.
A debate is raging in Cameroon about a constitutional amendment instigated by the ruling CPDM party and endorsed by the Head of State, in his New Year speech. What is your take on it?
Laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged they are, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. There is certainly a lot that needs to be reformed in the Cameroon Constitution, to align it with the aspirations of the people. However, in my personal opinion, the current clamouring by a spineless minority of sycophantic lapdogs for an amendment of the Constitution is a criminal distraction from the enormous problems facing Cameroonians.
Commonsense dictates that if you haven't succeeded in achieving your goals in 5 or 10 years, you'd never be able to achieve that in a century. Somebody once defined madness as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Just because Cameroonians live entangled in webs of endless deceit spun by the highest temporal authorities in a land where elementary truths are easily buried, does not guarantee that the people shall be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse.
What lessons from the recent chaos in Kenya that resulted from a controversial presidential election?
The bedrock of economic prosperity is peace, anchored on solid political structures that transcend any form of individualism and that ensure justice and equity for all, no matter the individual's social station.
Like most African conflicts, the political crisis in Kenya has been analysed and described as ethnic competition for control of the state by various competing tribes in the country. That is only partially true. The real cause lies in the groundswell of social and economic destabilization, triggered by rampant mis-governance and corruption. We are all too aware that in matters of corruption, Cameroon has nothing to learn from Kenya.
Additionally, competition for ever-diminishing resources and patronage in a prebendal state is guaranteed to stoke inter-ethnic competition in fractious states like Cameroon. Add to this explosive mix teeming legions of unemployed and unemployable youths that can be easily instrumentalized by failed politicians, then the nation is just a spark away from conflagration. So stealing elections becomes the ultimate insult to these young people who, by casting their ballot paper, place their hope in the prospects for change.
We in Cameroon are not very far from that precipice. Unfortunately, we do not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation lurking beneath us. We have failed to draw lessons from the recent outbreaks of violence in Abong-Mbang, Kumba, Bamenda, etc. The powers that be appear to be clinging, with ever increasing desperation and fear, to the mistaken notion that the drawing of innocent blood, through the unbridled use of live ammunition in policing, will cower the people.
Let us not fool ourselves. Cameroon is being altered irredeemably by unkept promises and the crass lack of vision from our leaders. If the Cameroon government is to avoid this, it must come to terms very quickly with the brutal legacy of its maladministration and the unequal power distributions inherited from colonial rule, including the constitution itself.
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