Leave the People Alone!

If in the developed world
the French and the English
do not see eye to eye on
many issues, will they in
the underdeveloped world?

The experiment of a so-called
Western-style bilingual culture
in Cameroun is an expensive
waste of everyone's time:
trying to be like France and
not really being it, while the
French-speaking majority
takes advantage of its numbers
to marginalize the so-called
English-speaking half of the country.

It is time to end this charade
and give citizens, English- and
French-speaking alike, a chance
to become what they want
with minimal effort.
Local communities should
be able to run their own
affairs without interference
from, or accountability to, agents
who do not belong to, and
do not care about, the local
community and its people.

Concentrating national power
in one individual, in one city,
concentrates resources, human and economic,
in that one city.
The proof? Just look at the African countries that
have only a name for the country and
a name for its capital. The rest
of the so-called country is in total darkness.

Call it side effects, but this is real: the side
effect of dictatorship is that the greedy
build a fence and keep everyone else out.
Inside the fence there's a party going on;
outside, there is what they call in French la galère.

The one way to change this
is for local communities to take power
to control their own affairs. People should
be able to reap what they sow, and do with it
as they please, at the local level. No one from
outside the community (unless they are an expert in something)
needs to come and tell the community how to clean
its streets, how to sweep its backyards,
how to raise its kids, how to…

— Wanaku Verdzekov