Plight of Cameroonian Youth: The Challenge of Living in a Morally Decaying Society

Introduction
Uncertainty, insecurity and even fear of the future are amongst the problems that confront youth in Cameroon. After providing some of the factors that brought about this situation, this article argues that though prospects are grim, the youth must not wait but act to reverse the tides.

Getting a Job after School: When Mediocrity Overrides Meritocracy
Whether well-trained or not, getting a job after schooling is a major dilemma to the youth. This difficulty has made many to believe that the only way to succeed or achieve their modernity dreams is through corruption. For example, they need to bribe their way to get into professional schools, which are the principal gateways to the public service. Generally, in today’s Cameron, it is difficult for honest, truthful and hardworking people to succeed, whether in education, politics or business, as fraud is the hallmark of the system. Each year, several million FCFA are spent by parents to enable their children gain admission into state-owned training school like ENS, INJS, ENAM and CUSS. Directors of these schools make a huge fortune from the obnoxious practice with impunity. Other graduates get recruited into the public service through client-patron networks.
In such a situation, meritorious and hard working youth, who normally are supposed to be recognized and compensated, watch with dismay how their less qualified mates are recruited and given distinction. The situation is further compounded by the fact that the education system does not equip students with the right tools to carry out development projects. It provides half-baked education which does not adequately equip students with the right skills and tools to be competitive enough in the global market.

Youth and Political activism
From time immemorial, young people have been a major force in initiating change in many societies. This may not be not very true of the Cameroonian youth. Though they were at the forefront of the pro-democracy movements of the early 1990s, they suddenly withdrew in the years that followed. This is because the democratic process failed to win their confidence. Hence, young people no longer trust the political system, the democratic procedures and their outcomes because they are unfair. Worse still, in Cameroon, the slogan ‘youths are the leaders of tomorrow’ has been used as a pretext to exclude youth from the decision-making process and to limit their aspirations. Though youth wings are attached to many political parties, they have not enabled young people to play any effective role. Praising-singing youth associations like President Paul Biya’s Youth (PRESBY) and other similar groups are mere smoke screens to further perpetuate manipulation of youth.

As a result of these numerous setbacks, majority of young people have adopted a defeatist attitude regarding their capacity to bring about change. Today, there is generalized apathy, fear, ignorance, apprehension, scepticism, resignation among young people regarding state affairs. Youth withdrawal or disinterestedness in public affairs does not augur well for democratic governance. Due to their vulnerability, young people are fast becoming preys for unscrupulous and overzealous politicians. As employment prospects are bleak and many young people are unable to fulfil their basic needs, political and bureaucratic elites take advantage of the situation to recruit youth as “ambulant” or proxy voters during elections. Some young people have even been used as thugs to disenfranchise fellow youth. This is in exchange of fulfilled or unfulfilled promises of recruitment into the public service, state companies or simply given money.

Seeing Young People as a Resource, not a Problem
Young people constitute an essential resource for development endeavours. Nature dictates that youth have energy to spare and eagerness to use it. They are ambitious, dynamic, constructive, enthusiastic and energetic and so their participation in governance and development. But unfortunately in Cameroon young people remain untapped and their human resources are wasted in joblessness or used for the wrong thing. To say the least, the participation of young people has been completely excluded from the mainstream of the state’s work, governance and development. In the words of the Commonwealth Secretary General; Donald McKinnon, “Postponing young people’s participation in governance can be very dangerous. It economic terms, it represents a squandering of human resources”.

Conclusion: What Youth Should Do
What comes out clearly from this paper is that the future of Cameroonian youth looks bleak. However, young people should not give up. The time has come when they must learn to say no to political manoeuvres and all sorts of manipulations. What should guide them is being true to themselves. They should consider themselves as a major stakeholder with a collective responsibility to participate actively in nation-building. They must realize they can be engineers of change by making themselves the best resource for development. Young people in Cameroon should be able to forge local and national networks to ask for more space within the political process. They must learn to make the voices heard in the public arena, to speak up for themselves rather than observe from the sidelines. University youth should show the way to the rest of the Cameroonian youth. This can help to mobilise youth for greater involvement in governance. Walters Samah, PhD: CAPED International (Cameroon)