Perspective: Where is our culture of Progress?
So instead of thoroughly enjoying my jog this morning and ruminating on the fond memories of my youth, the brokenness of my nation alarmed and disturbed me so much I spent more time thinking than jogging.
These 3 pictures are my nursery, primary and secondary (bilingual public) schools.
30+ years after I left these institutions, nothing (much) has changed.
The picture below is Lycée Général Leclerc, a secondary/high school established in “francophone” Cameroun in 1952 — before independence — and one of the oldest public secondary schools in Cameroon, many of whose alumni are Cameroon’s “Big Men”.
You guessed right, not much has changed.
As I jogged by, I took a picture of English High School — EHS — Yaoundé. A private secondary/high school established sometime in the 90s (If you know the year, kindly help me here). My younger brothers studied here; one in the late 90s, the other in the mid 2000s. Look at it in 2018. No one is bothered that the paint has faded off its name. As basic as that sounds.
I do not want to get into the sorry state of schools in the most rural (and even urban) parts of the country. Or the fact that schooling up North (for teachers and students) is a death-trap, or that schools are either a makeshift torn plastic tent-like thing under a tree, or in the middle of nowhere with pupils/students forced to sit on the dusty/muddy ground in harsh environmental conditions -for most. The other elements of nature hampering a young child’s need for the most precious of commodities and a young teacher’s passion for giving it. It’s beyond sad.
But I digress. Let me stay on this perspective lane to say this:
We do not — and we have refused to — have a progressive culture. This is one of the reasons we can hardly compete as a nation regionally and globally… we have — by our own hand — left ourselves behind with every generation that has arrived at the doorsteps of our nation who have potentials to make of it a land of true dreams.
This lack of maintenance and upgrade behaviour — this nonchalant sense of regress — permeates every single industry in my beloved country and goes way beyond physical walls. It is boiling under the cover of mediocrity festered by — yes — human beings. It is dangerous, damning and indicts those who sit in positions of decision-making.
But it indicts us — citizens of this nation — too for not being more PROactive in the #OfficeOfTheCitizen and taking more civic responsibility. It is pulling down the earlier efforts of noble men and women who did the right thing and left — what has now become — short-lived legacies. It is destroying the very fabric of our society as it has become the ‘norm’. Those most affected? Generations who come after generations before them.
And that’s my worry about my motherland.
That my children and your children and their children will take on the relay fight baton for deserving infrastructure, systems, institutions, utilities and resources that very few of you and I have spent our youth fighting for. That they will pay the price of our silence and inaction and in some cases, our ignorance.
Education is more than just the acquisition of knowledge, it is the shaping of culture and the strengthening of character. Today, the knowledge economy is everything and we need progressive foundational systems to implement and sustain it.
The opportunities to demand, act and get better governance and equity for all, that the generation before mine and the generation before theirs missed, is what my generation and the one after me is missing today. Just like that, the next generations are already in trouble.
You only have to see these to agree that our systems are deeply flawed. Is this supposed to be the bane of our lives and their lives — I ask you? Is it?
It’s a vicious cycle that will continue to haunt us until we all turn into zombies of broken systems and failed leaders.
I tell you solemnly, that vicious cycle is a nightmare I do not want to think about. That vicious cycle is the implosion none of us need. Unless we become a collective of civically engaged people fighting for the justice, welfare, equity and love for all — a thing that we all deserve and will all benefit from.
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PS: I should have studied public policy while I had the chance. Perhaps it’s not too late.
#OfficeOfTheCitizen #Cameroon
