WHAT'S WRONG WITH CAMEROON?

         DISCLAIMER: THIS PICTURE IS THE PROPERTY OF OF WORLD ATLAS
We often hear lots of people talk about what they think is wrong with Cameroon, the state and the economy. But if we go deep down, we may be surprised by what we actually discover. It's almost always a case of people ,blaming the government aka Paul Biya for all the misfortunes of Cameroon. Let's put it into perspective 'Paul Biya is the cause of all of Cameroon's problems?' That sounds absurd even in the ears of a baby.

Despite all the usual ranting of opposition politicians about Paul Biya ruining the country, the actual data tells a different side of the story.

Paul Biya came to power in 1982, and during that time, the economy of Cameroon was already in bad shape. But the thing is, during that time, there was a lot of media cencorship and so not many people knew about the real state of the economy. Cameroon was striving on excess subsidization at the time. Infact, just ask you dad how much a tin of sardines, a bottle of beer and a bar of soap cost in 1980. That year, 1980 was when the first signs of the economic crisis began to show, but as was the fashion at the time, we subsidized our way through it. And guess who was in power at that time...you guessed right - not Paul Biya.
We continued in this fashion, selling commodities and raw materials and using the proceeds to subsidize domestic consumption. that created a culture in us which has been hard to get rid of till this day.

However, subsidizing domestic consumption wasn't the worst thing we did back then, ask me what the worst thing we were doing back then was, I'll say it was our continued subvention granting to inefficient and uncompetitive parastatals, and protecting them from foreign competition, which only made them more inefficient. And all this subvention came from the proceeds from our massive raw material sales.

The big problem came up when the crisis stroke, which was a global one by the way, even hurting most of our Asian and European buyers. What this meant was that their demand for most of our commodities was substatially reduced. Any one who has ever had even the slightest idea on economics knows that when demand falls, prices fall. Hence, our revenue from the sale of our raw materials was drasticalmly reduced, and consequentlmy, we did not have the money to continue with our subsidy scheme anymore.

When Paul Biya came to power, the global effect of the crisis was strengthening, and our infant economy couldn't stand it anymore, so many of those subsidies had to either be removed completely, or substantially reduced. That's when the hatred started.

The truth is this; the reason why our economy took so long to recover is because our economy had never really been trained to cope with external shochs. We were a consumption economy, producing very little, except food and drink, which was mostly done by state-owned companies. But now...you don't need to be told about the explotion of private companies in Cameroon.

The previous administration had run the country with lots of communist principles, which was done with the best intentions; but with little consideration of the effects of communist. That's why they carried out such a massive subsidy scheme of consumption, production and a lot more. But the problem,...just take a look at other former communist states like Cuba and Russia and consider what they went through when they had to face competition. China is an exception of a well-organized and highly-competitive 'communist state'.

The real problem here is that a group of people still nostalgic of the 1970s can't seem to come to reality.

                                                                                                                            To be continued....

EGEOGHO CARLSON KIMBI