Interviewed by the Chronicle
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According to him, political parties and politicians who are not people
centered and have a vision controlled by Divine hands can never make it. It
is impossible for a state to function without a political party, he says, but
that political party must be there as a platform for economic development not
for people to use it to lord it over others.
Dr. Let us look
at our country and political changes across Africa. How do you evaluate the
strength of a political party? Is it by the number of its militants, the test
of time or an ideology?
A common thing to do is to evaluate a political party by its
numerical strength. That numerical strength expresses itself through the
elections. That is how many votes or places they got during an election. In the
circular world, you can use that to say this party is stronger than the other
one. But there is something wrong with that because the majority is
not always right.
Just because you are in the majority does not mean you are right. Right
means truth according to God’s standards not man’s thinking. When
we of the world get that power, yes we would evaluate ourselves
based on numerical strength. But there is a strength that goes beyond numerical
strength which is the strength that is based on the truth, the power to deliver
and the capacity to deliver. So, you can be in the majority and win but you do
not have the capacity to deliver. You would still fail and so when we judge you
numerically, you are strong but when it comes to productivity, you are weak.
Do you think political strength in terms of productivity in this country
is strong enough?
No, not yet because we do not have a clarity of issues. That is
why senate, parliament, the government and the civil society are working so
hard to catch up with the rest of the world. If all were OK, we should be as
productive as South Korea with whom we started in 1960. Our president has been
condemning inertia, individualism, corruption and the inability to take
decisions and to be proactive as some of the cankerworms we have to deal with
collectively as Cameroonians so that we can eventually see 2035.
The Bible says my people die for lack of vision and understanding
of kingdom principles. The way we define our goals and objectives and so on are
bias. Most of us are looking more at personal things and just want to take
power for the sake of power. If you ask a senator or parliamentarian why he is
a senator or a parliamentarian, he or she would not know why. Most of the time,
we are driven by personal goals. We might be on a political platform, but what
motivate us from deep within are our personal ambitions and our personal needs.
That is the need for ego, power and wealth. We need power just for just
throwing weight around and so on. But we are not driven by common good.
The only thing that makes a party successful is when its members
and everybody that grasp power are driven by common good; when they work to enhance common good and when
they do not try to separate the sheep from the goats. That is, when everybody
is treated equally and they are working with a God given understanding that
power is meant to be used for common good and to glorify His name. We must make
sure we work well in God’s vineyard. This is the key and that is
the foundation. If you are working in any political party or
whatever and following the teachings of Christ that you are the light of the
earth, you are the salt of the earth and each time you seek to be the salt and
the light of the earth and each other’s keeper, then it would be well.
But when we have our own personal agendas, when we want to get money
to build our houses, buy cars and to throw weight around we are off target. I
got wind of one of our senators who was quarreling about a sitting position in
one of the public manifestations. He wanted to sit next to the SDO. They
quarrel over things that are not important arguing like the apostles of Jesus;
who is the greatest and who seats to the right or left; that is not it. The
issue should be what you have done for the common good. The greatest is the
servant who gives and not the master who wants to receive all the time.
To link that aspect of political vision with Christianity or
religion, what would you say about the clergy and the civil society, that we
know are election observers and who are spiritually moved. How do assess their
contributions to the progress of democracy in our nation?
Some of them are good while others are just human beings. Human
nature is very strong. You can see Bishops managing the electoral process and
that electoral process would still be flawed. It is not because somebody wears
the cassock of a Bishop that makes him pious. It boils down to the spirit that
is in the person. I have come to understand that the human being needs
spiritual guidance every day. I need it every day. I have to realize that I
have to dwell in the presence of the lord all the time, otherwise my human
weaknesses would tend to override me and I make some stupid mistakes. If you
are going to do something and leave God out of it, it would never work. To let
us understand this better, a lot of people think that politics is of the world
and God is out of politics. No it is not true.
Let me put it this way. Politics is a platform from which we get
power to be able to administer in God’s vineyard. If you take America for
instance it is God’s vineyard. America does not belong to the Republican or
Democratic Party. America does not belong to President Obama, nor to George
Bush. America belongs to Americans and above all she belongs to God. Therefore,
when the CPDM is in charge, when President Paul Biya is in charge he is just a
servant in God’s vineyard. And therefore, if he wants Cameroon to progress, he
is not going to run Cameroon with his own thinking. That is why he prays for
wisdom to understand God’s will for him and this nation.
If we are going to run Cameroon with our own human thinking,
it would never work. We have to run Cameroon based on what God wants for his
people and for his vineyard. We cannot be servants in somebody’s
house and we set our own agendas and dictate our own rules. It would never
work. No matter how long it takes, it would crash. Therefore, the only sensible
thing we should be doing is to find out what our master wants, do them and we
would be blessed. So you can only succeed if you do what the master wants.
There is no way you can do contrary to the master and make it.
This is why I was so happy when our president went to pray with
the whole government at the cathedral in Yaounde soon after he was sworn in as
President. This is wisdom.
In other words, do you think this country is blessed?
As I just said, our president did something that gave me a lot of
joy. He took his ministers, the army and the Cameroon flag to the cathedral and
prayed and asked for God’s blessings. That was a sign that there was some
illumination of the spirit in our country. You know inherently the human being
is very ignorant. The bible says in the beginning the world was without form.
There was darkness and there was nothing. The spirit of God went over that void
on the first day of creation, God said let there be light and there was light.
President Paul Biya seeks the light, the Spirit of God, Understanding and
Wisdom from above.
When you begin to hook up with the spirit of God then you get
light. If you do not hook up with the spirit of God, you are in darkness just
like in the beginning the world was without form and was void. When you operate
in ignorance, you are operating in that void. When the light of God shines its
spirit, then you begin to operate in a manner that is productive.
Talking about political parties, let us say that in Cameroon there
are three hundred parties. It is a shame. For the sake of the argument let me
tell you that there are only two political parties in Cameroon. Forget about
the others which I cannot possibly name for want of space and time. Let us
reduce everything to two parties for the sake of proper argument so that this
country can move forward.
If you go to the US, a country that is a lot bigger and more
mature than ours, they have two political parties-the Republicans and the
Democrats. In Great Britain there are three, the Labour party, the Green party
and the other one. So you begin to see that in mature democracies, it is not
the number of parties that make for democracy. In the circular world, we are
defining those platforms and any political party usually comes up with a
working strategy. They promise the people if we get to power, we are doing this
and that for you.
Again as we were saying, we have only two political parties in
this country. If you look into their manifestoes, none of them says they would
kill, none of them says they would steal and none of them says the bad things.
If you go to all the three hundred parties, all of them are giving you the good
side of themselves. There is no way you can be going to the market to sell your
coco yams or pawpaw or anything and you rub shit on it. You try to polish them
so that they are good looking. The parties are selling themselves. Therefore,
everybody tries to give you a beautiful part of them.
But this is the problem, when you actually give them the power or
when they have the power, they do not do as they said especially in weak
democracies. So it is the doing part that messes us up. Therefore, how do you
evaluate a political party to find out whether they are worth their salt? They
must not necessarily be in power for you to evaluate them. Keep
an eye on what they say and do. The doing must outmatch the saying.
That is the most important thing.
But in Africa, there is more talking than actually doing. You
see, Christ came up with this parable where the master gave one talent to one
of the servants, two to another servant and five to the other. The one who had
five talents multiplied them and the one with two also multiplied them but the
one who had one talent buried it.
So now, if God has given somebody two talents, evaluate him on the
two talents and if God has given one five talents, evaluate him on the five
talents. If we come to our country for example, the CPDM has the five talents
because they have the treasury and they are responsible for constructing the
schools, roads and so on. So when you are evaluating them, evaluate them and
find out whether they have constructed the roads they said they would do. If
they did not, then there is a problem.
Now when you come to the SDF, the SDF has two talents. The SDF
does not have the state treasury, so to begin to say that the SDF has not
constructed roads is a wrong measure. Why? Because, they were not given five
talents. They were given two talents. If you want to evaluate the SDF, find out
whether with the two talents given them, they are doing the right thing. How do
we find out whether they are doing the right thing? Are they doing the basic
things they are supposed to do? Are they concerned about their neighbors? Look
at the leadership. Do they give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is
God’s? When you have a problem like that which erupted in Bambili, where the
rules are not respected; there is a cause for concern. It is thus possible to
cry about a stolen victory here but you create a stolen victory situation when you
have the yam and the knife. Then are you using your two talents right?
So what is the common thing we should be looking for in
somebody who has one talent, two talents or five talents? It is
the truth. Truth is the thing. It does not matter if somebody has five talents,
ten talents, look for truth. The number of talents does not alter your truth.
Truth is your truth. If we are looking for the right people, we are looking for
the truth. When somebody makes a declaration, watch them and
see the things they do. Do they seize things from others? What is their
capacity for giving? That is where you can judge them.
What is the difference between the state activities and a political
party activity? Looking at the ruling party and the SDF as our examples, when does
a state act and when does a political party act?
There is something that we must understand. There is no where a
state can act without a political party. It is not possible. The question is
when are you acting as a state and when are you acting as a political party and
with whose resources?
When you have two parties say the SDF and the CPDM, they are vying
for political power and political positions. They want the people, the
population to mandate them so that they can do things on behalf of the people
using the people’s resources. When you have that power, then you have to choose
people from amongst you whom you trust that can deliver the goods and put them
in the positions of power. They would use the resources judiciously
and bring to the people what they want to solve their daily and developmental problems. So
technically, you need a party in power that uses the power from the people and
the resources of the people to carry out the business of the people.
The problems only come when you get to power and then use the resources of the
people to solve other problems rather than the people’s problems.
Apart from political analyses, let us look at political development.
Let us look at the economy. Most political parties in this country and their
economic policies are still very much complicated. What is your take on that?
If you do not address economic issues then, you have got it
completely wrong. For a country to move forward, you need three or four things.
The first thing is that you need security which is very important. There is
nowhere in the world that you can achieve anything without security. So peace
and security are the first and foremost things that we need in a country. That
is why we have the gendarmes, the army and so on. But it is not just the army
and the gendarmes that bring about peace; it is the level of
understanding of a people that actually brings peace. It is
how much you educate your people that brings peace. You do not get peace by the
gun. Peace by the gun is not peace. The real peace comes from the education and
understanding of a people. If you can educate your people, you
would get peace.
This is where political parties come in. Whether they are in power
or not, whether they are in the electoral process or not, they should be
educating the public so that concepts are well understood; So that darkness
becomes light. What Ngwanyam is doing now is trying to bring that education so
that we understand things better. The more people understand what I am saying
the less there would be strive and the more there would be peace and success.
We need peace in the country, in the home and everywhere. Peace is the
foundation. There is no peace without God. There is no peace without truth.
There is no peace when you do not treat your neighbor as yourself. Peace means
treating others like you would like to be treated. Peace means giving.
The second thing is, you must have economic development. The
economy of the country must grow. The economy looks at the resources of the
country and gives those resources a multiplier effect. Then you use the resources
from the economy like money and human resources to be able to bring development
like the roads, the schools, the health infrastructure, and the homes. People
need to live decent lives. If it were possible, everybody should live in a
house with air conditioning, tiles on the floor, nice windows, good lighting,
water flowing, water system toilets and nobody goes to the bush. That would be
good if we could get there. But when you begin to have some people living a
very decent life and some are still living in squalor and in shacks, there is a
problem.
Therefore, the economy has to grow and that economic growth has to
trickle to everybody. Common goods like roads and hospitals must be there. Even
if somebody is living in a shack and is able to ride on a good road he would
feel better. The road to Nkambe for instance, instead of paying 6000FCFA you
should pay 3000FCFA because the road is good. So peace is important, economic
growth is important and that economic growth should not be only for a particular
people. Economic growth in Cameroon should not only be for the Bamilekes. It
should be for the Anglophones, the Betis and the northerners. Government should
create an enabling environment in which people express themselves and change
the elements they get from the environment to add value to the system. Everybody
should have access to that economic growth which is very important.
The next thing of course is the development of the human capacity.
You have to help people to develop their human capacities so that they can
express themselves in a creative manner. What we lack in Cameroon is the power
of creativity because it has not been developed. The power of creativity is
developed through intuition and education. Our education has not allowed for creativity
in our youths. That is why; when you see that a lot of people are trying to
create a business; everybody creates a micro financial institution.
Everybody wants to keep someone’s money but they do not know how
to generate money. If you increase the number of micro financial institution in
the country, that does not increase the general wealth. You need to increase
the general wealth of the community by sowing seeds and growing them. That is
by building up your productive capacity. As long as you have not built up your
production capacity, it will not augur well. Production capacity is only built
through technology, building the youth and training them in a manner that they
are creative, and working to add value to the system. We have to build our own
industries and cause the transformation of our own raw materials before
selling. We should reduce importation and increase exportation of finish goods
not raw materials. Importing rice and corn is not a good sign.
You give people the opportunity to be able to work. All youths
should have work. If you are going to have a lot of youth that are not working,
that is going to be a time bomb.
Apart from political moment of elections, what else would you
suggest political parties should do?
As we said, political parties want to grab power and then use that
power for the good of the community. But we have seen that the concept of
common good is still farfetched in our country. That is what the President was
condemning in his New Year speech that individualism has taken over collective
good. We need to come back to the drawing board and make sure that we work to
enhance collective good.
Therefore, whether a party is in power or not, it is not about
waiting for elections and then you jump on the streets with bands and start
campaigning and insulting each other. There is something that you ought to be
doing, whether it is an election year or not. Continue the education of the
people so that they know what is true and what is false. And when you are
educating the people, make sure that you are also practicing truth. While we
condemn others and probably say a few truths here and there, we do not practice
truth. So I am sure we need to take some lessons on practicing truth.
DR NICK NGWANYAM, MD
CEO ST LOUIS GROUP
POB 661 BAMENDA
NORTH WEST REGION
REP OF CAMEROON
REP OF CAMEROON
TEL( CELL) 237-
7776 46 74
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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