Cameroon:Toying With Decentralisation

By Tazoacha Asonganyi in Yaounde.

Governing a country is very complex business. What every country is worth largely depends on how this complexity is managed. The extent to which the citizens ensure that no single individual is in general charge, and to which everyone involved is partly in charge, determine how well a country fares. The general health of a country depends on the extent to which the people run their own affairs without any citizen feeling the need to be in phase with some political grouping, religious creed, or tribal cabal in order to enjoy their freedom and happiness, or live a fulfilled life.
The management of the complex business of governance involves bargains and accommodations among factions and interest groups, to give enough room for individual initiative and discretion, group adaptation, and functional variations between communities.


The centralized set-up that has prevailed in Cameroon since the ‘60s has meant that an all-powerful central figure stuffed the top with political appointees and civil servants. It has meant that in daily life, recommendations move upwards and orders flow downwards. This is why most appointees, civil servants, and politicians always give the impression that they lack initiative, and always do what they do because “His Excellency the Head of State” directed them to do so. They hardly ever exercise independent judgement, let alone think for themselves, since they always do only what they are told to do! And so commonsense, imagination, and other personal talents hardly have any room in the daily work of citizens.


Centralisation has been discredited by corruption, embezzlement of public funds, waste of resources, indolence and laxity, human rights violations, secretiveness about the people’s business, the rule of power in place of the rule of law, and generalised distrust and suspicion of the people by those in power. It has been discredited by the monopoly model of electricity and water supply inherited from colonial government, which has not only been incapable of continuous supply of the amenities to all local council areas, but also of supplying them at affordable prices.


Centralisation has converted us into hostages of the rainy season during which most rural areas are cut-off from urban centres by bad roads; and road construction and maintenance works, as well as the movement of goods and services across the country are at a standstill. Central control freaks have shown a self-interested unwillingness to plan investment activities to coincide with the dry season. Centralisation has confiscated the power the people are supposed to wield, and reduced them to beggars, while those they have put forward to fend for them have elevated themselves to the position of bountiful givers.


This evidence that centralization and the complexity of governance are not good bedfellows generated the hope that the mode of decentralization that Cameroonians have been clamouring for, and that was finally inscribed in the 1996 constitution would break the stranglehold of centralization on the state. Unfortunately, the way in which the decentralization programme is being implemented leaves the impression that it is just another aspect of centralization! The work to be done is being subdivided and parcelled out, while the same people are still hanging desperately on to central control. The people are still being prevented from the free exercise of opinion and initiative – from electing their representatives. The top is still being stuffed with appointees and civil servants.


It was hoped that decentralisation would allow council areas to plan investment activities strategically; and with vision for the future of the council; and with help from a responsible and responsive government, procure enough funds to allow council areas to freely carry out road construction and maintenance works, and other investment projects – like building of schools, health and administrative infrastructures, and the provision of various social amenities – only during the dry season. The rainy season would therefore be reserved for all the paper work related to investment projects in readiness for serious investment works during the 3 – 4 months of dry season each year. Two to three cycles of such strategic planning and execution of investment projects by local councils would cause serious positive changes in economic and human development indicators of not only the local areas, but the country as a whole.


Indeed, it was hoped that such decentralisation would empower the people, promote subsidiarity, transparency, and local democracy, and institute local regulatory structures and sources of funds, leaving the central government to be the facilitator, not the all-encompassing provider. This would make it possible for services like electricity and water supply to be set-up in local areas as competitive businesses, not privileges guarded by monopolies. These expectations have been dashed by what we are witnessing today.


Many persons like Hans Eysenck and other racist scientists, in order to justify slave trade, colonization and exploitation, and the present social, economic and political backwardness of Africa, argued that it was all due to hereditary determinism; that it is due to our genes. However, the recently concluded human genome project that has mapped all the genes in man has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that “race" is a fallacy that has no basis in science. In other words, our backwardness in Africa is not due to the fact that our genes are different from the genes of the people that live in the western world; we are all just human beings.


What is certain is that human beings are affected by nature and nurture; backwardness and progress depend on how humans deal with the two factors. Nature would be about how we face the hills and valleys, rain and sunshine, the dry and rainy seasons, winter, spring, and summer, etc. Nurture would refer to how the environment in which we grow up allows us to face and dominate these natural forces to the advantage of the advancement of society. In the domain of nurture are freedom and liberty, democracy and the rule of law, education and the discipline that free the mind of the individual citizen who is symbolic of the hen that lays the "golden egg" of development.


Organisation of flawed elections, sit-tight leaders, daily violation of human rights, embezzlement and misuse of the common wealth that is controlled by the government, are all reasons why man in Africa falls far behind man in the western world in many aspects of life. Citizens are interested in freely running the affairs of their communities. The more reason why they should be given the opportunity to control their own affairs, in order to put an end to an organisational structure that creates a sea of poverty and helplessness, with a bloated island of arrogance and opulence floating at the centre.