Dear Dr. Tumassang, while agreeing with you very strongly on the submissions you've made to counter Rexon's reasoning which unfortunately am not priviledged to see, may I say that slavery still exists in another form which I also agree that needs time to address. Can you buy the fact that we are still working virtually for free on the whiteman's plantations? He seemingly left us 'free' but kept his glasses to be watching us while we work-else tell me why we are the ones who produce coffee and cocoa and it is they that determine the prices for such produce? When they build their cars and planes and sell to us do we in any way determine the price? I am of the school of thought that we should abandon the cultivation of rubber, tea, cocoa and coffee which we were told in elementary economics as being responsible for our foreign earnings and concentrate on the cultivation of plantains, cocoyams, beans, pepper, corn etc. and practice intra African trade. This as of now is bringing huge foreign earnings that are hardly factored into our economies. If we fail to sell rubber or cocoa to the white man there is nothing we can do to those products but if we cannot sell our yams and corn we can consume it locally. Presently a bucket of pepper i.e. about 4kgs of pepper is presently selling for 40,000 CFA and is in high demand at the most populous African country Nigeria. A bag of coffee the whiteman tells us sells at 20,000CFA and is highly labour intensive and could be turned down for smelling smoke. Is it worth it asking our people to continue to yoke doing this? We have a lot to export on our own without counting on our corrupt governments that probably negotiates some of these shady deals under the guise of international trade. Plantains, beans, potatoes and several forms of vegetables are doing brisk business and we should encourage our citizens to embark on this form of agriculture and seek our own free markets within Africa. We are still slaving and like you rightly put it our rogue governments are largely to blame for it. We sell rubber to a whiteman for a pittance. He manufactures a tyre and sells back to us at a cut throat price thereby recovering the initial sums he used in obtaining the raw material have we not then worked on the whiteman's plantation for free? If we try to transform some of the rubber into tyers they are the first to discourage even local usage that they are of low quality and therefore dangerous to use. What alternative do we have? We discard the locally made tyres and end up with used tyers from Europe that are even more dangerous but with no warning signs to the users or we buy the new ones for 250,000 CFA for the smallest ones. The more I think the more I feel we should go the Maotsetung way of closing Africa to all western cicvilization and constrain our technicians to come up with blue prints for implementation. Unfortunately for you and me my brother this cannot happen for as long as we have colonial agents for heads o states and governments. Let's hope that with the arrival of Mrs. Zuma at the helm of the AU Secretariat things will augur differently for Africa. Intra African trade for me is the shot term answer to counter imperialistic trends in determining the prices for our produce. Now that some of our farmers have learned and are reducing the production of coffee and cocoa, market trends are beginning to change in their favour but this can only last for as long as Brazilian and Malaysian coffee and rubber continue to be in short supply. Whither the West Cameroon Marketing Board! They used to try to regulate the markets so as not to disadvantage the local farmer at any given moment prices high or low but the Frogs took over this structure and, emptied the stabilisation fund and have kept our farmers yawning. Dr. Tumassand, I've given you a potpourri of several thoughts that are running through my mind but I believe that you could polish this up and guide us to take away slavery once and for all from the continent. Visha Fai On Sun, 5/8/12, Tumasang Martin <tumasangm@hotmail.com> wrote:
From: Tumasang Martin <tumasangm@hotmail.com>
Subject: Cameroon Judicial Power- A Tool in the hands of Executive Power!: Please give some credit to the Black Man
To: cameroon_politics@yahoogroups.com
Cc: camnetwork@yahoogroups.com, ambasbay@googlegroups.com
Date: Sunday, 5 August, 2012, 10:57
Rexon, you wrote "If you look at the history of Africans, things have never been different from what it used to be hundreds of years ago. In fact, we are now in a different form of slavery and from the period of transatlantic slavery, these things have been happening".
I fully disagree with the above statement. Things are not the way they used to be 100 years ago in Cameroon or many other African countries. If you take any field of human endeavour, the changes have been remarkable even more than what the Europeans had in various periods of 100 years in the past. Take education for example. When I was a small child, to read and write was a major issue. Today almost everyone in Cameroon can read and write. The literacy rate is so high. This alone makes the above statement not to be true. The change in literacy alone is monumental. If you take communication, we had a problem of poor communication. The advent of the mobile phone has changed this significantly. The bad roads remain but people can communicate easily via mobile. This change alone cannot be underestimated. If you take the professions, Cameroon is self sufficient in various professions today like Teaching, Law etc. Cameroon does not import lawyers to help them. The Law profession has done a good job in domesticating the profession and most of the legal issues are handled by Cameroonians. Go to Manyu alone and count the number of legal heavy weights there. Going to the ICJ against Nigeria, Cameroon had to hire Lawyers from London and add with the local team but you can understand that the stakes were just to high on this one. Nigeria exports Professors to places like Trinidad and Tobago (30 Nigeria Professors and 400 Doctors and Nurses there). Ethiopia needed manpower some time ago and Nigeria sent 150 Professors there without blinking. The Black man is increasingly in control of his own destiny. If you look at say road construction. As a child, we thought tarring a road could be done only by White Contractors, Razel, etc etc. Even almighty Nangah Construction was doing only buildings and not roads. Today our boys are tarring roads left, right and centre. I am a roads Contractor myself and I know what my Front end loaders, Graders , rollers etc are doing out there. We have domesticated the road building techniques hence there are significant changes. I am not saying there are no road problems. The road problems are many and people are improvising. In fact a private individual contracted me to do a 4 kilometre road (new and un tarred) through difficult terrain to a new sand pit he is opening and one of my Caterpillars, a CAT7E chain foot Bulldozer has been busy on it and about to complete it. This is an example of a significant change. We do not need the white man to come and do it for us. At times we do not even need the government to come and do it for us. On the issue of second slavery, I am not sure I understand you properly. The number of skilled manpower we sell internationally is remarkable. Our doctors, Engineers, Nurses etc. etc. are doing a good job internationally and that cannot be called slavery. I am writing from Cairo where I am handling a claim case of over 100 million US dollars due to a contract in Libya that got stopped due to the war in Libya and the Libyan army confiscated my Clients vehicles, equipment etc to use for the war. I am claiming on behalf of my client of the loss and expense due to the Force Majeure of the war. Due to insecurity, I cannot go and do it in Tripoli hence handling it from Cairo. Would I consider myself a slave because I sell my skills and expertise internationally?. The answers is no. I am a Quantum Expert and goes around the world (UK, France, Germany, Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc etc.) selling my skills where ever a major claim is involved and I am contracted. The skilled Europeans have been selling their skills abroad for years but were not considered slaves. We do not need to all remain in Cameroon at the same time to make a difference. I do not know why you consider the situation as second slavery. Even the unskilled ones who come abroad are not slaves. They are doing work that has to be done and the effect of their remittance back home in the various families is significant. To work as a care worker, to clean a toilet, to clean offices etc is not slavery. It is normal respectable work and I respect those doing it. It is honest work that contributes to the GDP of the nation. You have dirty people not dirty jobs. Whites from Eastern Europe are now fighting for this type of work in London and other places. A slave is taken to the slave fields against his will. We are fighting to get visas for Europe for greener pastures (not because we were starving in Cameroon. Enough food for everyone). We just want to upgrade. Rexon, sincerely, I think you should give some credit to the black man. We have survived in the face of unimaginable adversity with a more powerful culture working against us. We have caused some of our problems also due to corruption etc. but all the blame cannot be on us. We need time to reach there. Most of our nation states are only 50 years old. |
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