their history, their rights, their future

Hello Chief,

Feel free to use the information as best we can. The more the right people know, the better for all of us.

There is a lot of information about ex-British Southern Cameroons, but it needs to be processed and delivered to different audiences in different ways, so that the message is received and the recipient takes the necessary action. It seems we have not set up the right kind of framework (people and resources) to do this job. The result: mixed messages, information overload, confusing messages… leading to no consistent message at all (from the people's point of view).

Most of our people are not PhD, master's, bachelor's or even GCE A Level graduates. So a lot of the high-level language is like water off a duck's back, like a wind passing without shaking a leaf. The usual resigned attitude is: "Na da book people them de fight again. Wuna leave them." ("It's the educated people fighting again. Leave them to it.")

In my humble opinion, what we need to do to help our people is really hard, but it can be done. In fact, it is done daily by businesses and innovative enterprises. What they do is take a complicated problem, break it into smaller chunks, solve the smaller problems, and then rebuild the whole again. It is a kind of divide-and-conquer philosophy, but applied correctly, it can produce some of the best solutions humanly possible to complex problems.

A certain gentleman (Ebai) suggested that ex-BSC citizens should work in various professional committees to help mobilize our people. In my mind, that sounds like a good divide-and-conquer approach that should be looked at.

We hear of the Arab Spring here and there. The Arabs have several things that bring them together, such as religion: after Friday prayers at the mosque, they can pour out en masse and make heads turn to their issues. Our people do not have that kind of cohesion. That is a problem that needs solving.

How do we breathe cohesion (a spirit of oneness) into a large cross-section of our people? What can replace religion as a rallying point for all our people? Some might say, don't replace religion; use it. Well, which one?

It might be more challenging, but I think working on the right messages for our people will, in the long run, create a critical mass of informed citizens who know about their history, their rights, their future, and that of the generations to come.

Whatever we do should be simple… I think.

And the ramble goes on (some call it brainstorming). I will stop here for now. Excuse the long mail. I sometimes ramble a lot…

Just my two shillings.
~wv

— Wanaku Verdzekov