Intellectuals to the Rescue?

Replying to a mailing-list post that called on the National Assembly to invite constitutional experts, academics, civil society and the clergy to debate constitutional and electoral reform, including presidential term limits:

Bobe,

You have challenged the intellectuals and academics of Camerounia to sit up and use their brain muscles to bring the people out of a quagmire.

The problem is that the intellectual and academic community in Cameroun is a mixed bag. What do I mean? Simply put, there are two types of intellectuals and academics in this region:

• the true ones, who do the work that true academics and intellectuals do anywhere in the world; and
• the pseudo-academics and intellectuals, who have been integrated and assimilated by the existing system of government. To be more precise, these are citizens whose foundational knowledge is based on the curricula of the (Ab)Normal Schools of Higher Learning (you can translate that into French and find out).

The issue is not whether the education in these (Ab)Normal schools is worthy or not. The issue is: do these so-called academics and intellectuals have the capacity to lead our people and make the kinds of changes needed (as you suggested, "constitutional and electoral reforms") to take the country from point A to point B?

If experience is anything to go by, the answer to that question is a solid no. There are several reasons. One is simply that, for example, divisional officers are not trained to criticize government policy coming from above (that is, from Yaoundé), no matter how impracticable the policy might be.

It is a complex, real-life situation. At the end of the day, any meaningful change affects real people. The question is: does an individual's life become more or less meaningful after the change?

Now that is a great brain-muscle exercise.

iBoisɨ
~wv

— Wanaku Verdzekov