IS THE LACK OF INITIATIVE OR OPPORTUNITY THE ROOT CAUSE OF POVERTY IN CAMEROON?

The question above is one that has often gotten into the minds of many Cameroonians of both the young and old generations, and its only normal that we share this experience from a great forward thinking young female Cameroonian who preferred to stay anonymous.

As someone from a more or less modest/moderate family background with a variety of teachers and entrepreneurs alike, I believe if after completing teachers’ training college, you come home to your neighborhood and open a daycare center, you will never lack 10 families that will happily leave their babies in your care while they go out and do their jobs. If you charge just 10,000FCFA per child per month, you will be earning 100,000FCFA doing something you love, in the comfort of your home, that you are great at, and that will never go out of business.

But some prefer to suit-up every morning to go and answer “yes sir” for someone else 8 hours a day and 5 or 6 days a week for a monthly salary of less than 50,000FCFA. (Not trying to demean or value the sum, but you can bear with me that it’s never a pain to be rightly ambitious).

If after completing your university studies in accounting, you sit down and program a simple small business management software that you can operate from your laptop, the small business owners in your town will be more than grateful to allow you help them manage their accounts for a small cash reward. If you charge just 3000FCFA per month per small business and you have 100 of them, you would be earning more than the manager of every micro-finance institution in Cameroon, and some bank managers. But you prefer to wear a suit and tie every morning with your worn-out shoes to go and work as a teller for a credit union or cashier for a supermarket that will pay you 42,000FCFA.

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This thing called “initiative” is something they don’t teach us in school. It is true that creativity and entrepreneurship are conspicuously lacking in the Cameroonian curriculum on all levels. The evidence of this is that the average school dropout has a high tendency of becoming the future employer of the average graduate. Yes, when people drop out of school, they become practical students of the real world while those pursuing degrees remain fixated on the learning outcomes of the outdated curriculum, usually taught by professors who themselves have no idea what they are teaching. But let us spare the malfunctioning school system for a while and turn the attention to us, as initiative and creativity really boil down to common sense, which they say isn’t taught in the four walls of a classroom.

Come to think of it:

Each time you drink a bottle of Coca-Cola, how often does it occur to you that all that is in that bottle is water, sugar, gas, and caffeine? Which of those ingredients is lacking in your town if you want to make your own energy drink?

Each time you bite a bar of Mambo Chocolate, how often does it occur to you that this is just paste made out of the same cocoa that is shipped out of Kumba on a daily basis?

With all the Fulanis rearing cows on the hills or the North West Region, how many small businesses do we have that manufacture and sell dairy products like milk, cheese, yoghurt. Come and see how Njieforbi Bakery, Imagine Bakery, etc are overflowing with customers, but all you will find there is Dolait, Camlait, and all the lait’s.

With all the Bamenda boys and girls with degrees in Biochemistry, Food Technology, etc, which one is working on stabilizing and bottling our precious Mbuh from Batibo or Palm Wine from Bafut so that we can cut down on the amount of poison we import from Douala and Equatorial Guinea in the name of beer and wine?

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Go to Bamenda Food Market or Muea Market in Buea of Marche Sandanga in Douala, and you will not need a degree in Agri-business to know that more than 40% of what is harvested in the farms get lost to decay due to lack of proper handling and preservation. Yet our wives go to shops and buy imported processRelated News: Agriculture Development In Cameroon – The Greenhouse Ventures Wayed and packaged spices and foodstuff of all varieties?

So it turns out that our problem is not a lack of opportunity but that of lack of initiative. We can say all we want against the educational system, the government, the colonial system, and so on, but no matter how true those blames are, the ultimate truth is that change begins with us, and unless we change, we will not see any change in the world.

So, I guess all I am really trying to say today is that this thing called initiative doesnot need you to have a degree before exercising it. This thing called initiative does not need capital and connections for you to find use for it. And those who have this thing called initiative don’t have time for blames and excuses, because they are busy getting rich…

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