Your Excellency,

Your ministry announced on July 1, 2017, that an agreement has been reached with a Chinese company Sichuan Telecommunications Eng for the production of 500.000 laptops promised to students by the Head of State President Paul Biya. Your ministry further mentioned that 30% of the budget has already been made available by Exim bank. Very good initiative, but Mr. Minister, why?

Mr. Minister, there is a saying that goes thus “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Mr. Minister, you are one of the protagonists of vision 2035 aimed at making Cameroon an emerging nation. Please tell me how we can emerge by 2035 if we go borrowing to provide laptops to students. What you’ve failed to tell the soon to be beneficiaries of these laptops is that as taxpayers tomorrow, they will in one way of the other pay back the loan to Exim Bank. Why not use the loan Mr. Minister and bring in a company like IBM, Lenovo etc, to build a production plant in Cameroon in which technology will be transferred and create jobs. Won’t you be proud as Minister of Higher Education to see laptops in shops with the inscription “Made in Cameroon”? Countries like Rwanda have tried this approach which is working so well today and has created more than 5.000 jobs.

Mr. Minister, I saw you attending the Cameroon Investment Forum in May 2016 as well as the first ever Cameroon Diaspora Forum which just rounded up in Yaounde a week ago, as well as many other conferences and seminars you’ve attended. Please Mr. Minister tell me and the Cameroonian people how we can emerge as a nation by 2035 if we still go borrowing from foreign banks to provide laptops to students, instead of using the loans to invest and create jobs in a country where there is a total lack of trust towards a government that is full of promises. One of the recommendations made in the just ended Cameroon Diaspora Forum is to encourage Cameroonians who are experts in their respective fields to invest back home. I can tell you that there are many Cameroonians in the globe who are highly placed experts in Information and Communication Technology. Why not make use of these experts, use the loan from Exim bank and develop a mechanism in which an assembly plant would be set up to produce laptops and create jobs?

Mr. Minister, I don’t think to provide 500.000 laptops to students is the most pressing problem affecting the educational system in our country, the system needs to be REFORMED. The most pressing problem remains that of a lost academic year in the Southwest and Northwest regions. Mr. Minister “further steps can then be taken to address the interrupted school year. Specifically, intensive courses could be offered over the long vacation, along with a special second session of all the exams that have been disrupted. The start of the next academic year may even be slightly delayed, but we would have gone a long way in making amends”. (Things Fall Apart by Barrister Akere Muna). Mr. Minister, it cannot be right that a country that is so blessed has our young men and women with only one ambition, to get a free laptop from the state and then what?

Mr. Minister, I will conclude now by saying that in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, he makes a savvy use of proverbs from the Igbo people. One that comes to mind is: &the lizard that jumped from the high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did”. Like the lizard, some are marching all over the country, monopolizing the public media in self-praise, while everyone else watches in complete stupefaction. They see that the center can no longer hold because things are falling apart. However, it is not too late to change our course”. Please, Mr. Minister, revisit your decision, ask Sichuan Telecom Eng to come and set up a production plant in Cameroon, teach our young men and women how to build laptops and computers and create jobs.

Long Live the Republic of Cameroon!

Julius Njonguo

Brugge-Belgium.