By Tazoacha Asonganyi in Yaounde
September does not seem to be a special month only in the USA! It is a month usually pregnant in Cameroon with mischief!It was when September 2006 was wrapping up that the present government was formed. Then we were told that standing instructions to members of the new government were to obey the PM! With all the water that has gone under the bridge, it actually looks now like the PM is presiding in impotence over an impotent government! The government looks more like a like a conscript army where members seem to be doing their duties but have doubtful faith in their commander... and in one another. If it were not Cameroon, the scandals that have been unfolding and festooning the entire government, would have led to the birth of another government in September.Roosevelt’s new deal was brought about because he believed that people who are hungry and people who are poor are the stuff with which dictatorships are made. The poverty and hunger that took us to the streets in February were still with us in September because the Cameroonian version of the new deal survives precisely because of hunger and poverty. As is customary with the new deal, there were speeches upon speeches, promises upon promises, conferences upon conferences, but all just for the sake of giving the impression that something was happening. It was little more than spectacle.Mobile phones and other communication gadgets are supposed to increase our security by reducing the distance between us and the security services. Many media outlets remind us on a daily basis, the numbers to call when there is a fire or a thief or anything that needs the immediate intervention of the security forces. When we finally sense danger and call these numbers, we usually meet with silence or lack of cooperation because there is no means of moving to the danger due to … lack of petrol! Sometimes, the lack of cooperation is due to the absence of a “chef” to give orders for action to be taken.And so we were left to watch helplessly as Limbe was taken hostage and ransacked! This was either due to this generalised nonchalance or to the absence of orders from hierarchy. Otherwise, how can one explain that with the abundance of cell phones and the availability of access numbers of security services, Limbe turned out to be so naked? Our security forces have abandoned the citizens to their fate for so long, and might have thought that it was the same old situation of the citizen fighting the thief or the fire alone, with untimely deaths or unnecessary loss of property. Again, if we were not in Cameroon, there would have been resignations and sackings!With the collapse of communism and the economic system it incarnated, there were boasts from ultra-liberals that the market would start the new millennium as an economic deity. We were told that the free market is like a sensitive nervous system that responds to events and signals in the market place with indifference to the status, religion or race of the actors. There were retorts from the left that capitalism by nature is ruthless, and leads to unfair income distribution, social injustice and human indignity; therefore there is need to influence free market forces through taxes, benefits, regulations, supervision and discipline.The closing of September with the collapse of markets in the hands of especially ultraliberal regimes is testimony to the fact that the market is an incompletely understood monster. The collapse informs us that ultra-liberal economists are not the scientists they claim they are because of the present grotesque gamble to save the market! Economists, like scientists may deal in figures, graphs, and computer print-outs, but their gamble of correlating reactions of need and greed to past actions of government, with the hope of predicting the reactions of the “greedy” to future, similar actions is not science because the results cannot be repeated over and over again by different economists in different settings. It is dawning on them that the behaviour of the greedy is not easily predictable: when faced with a situation of “greed”, they can hoard and save, just as they can spend and waste, leading to excess and collapse of prices, or scarcity and the soaring of prices that are with us today.Cameroonians easily equate capitalism with corruption because of the degree to which corruption accompanies the various efforts to force “ideal” capitalism down the throat of the new deal regime. Although cronyism is an attitude dictated more by opportunism than loyalty, the new deal has constantly sought the company of loyalists in the hope that they would help the prince to forget his own woes, since they would not judge his actions. This has been a great disservice to the country as a whole because under the cloak of party loyalty, thieves and thugs emptied the public treasury, leaving our economy in tatters. They were helped along by the conviction that since this did not result in a penalty of some kind for over two decades, their behaviour was the norm.September ended with white-collar rogues continuing to have sleepless nights, and the rest of us momentarily choking in mocking laughter! September ended with ultra-liberals using socialist strategies to save capitalism!
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