Camair-Co GM raises alarm on Anglophones impersonation

The General Manager of Cameroon Airlines Corporation, Camair-Co, Jean-Paul Nana Sandjo, says most workers posing as Anglophones in the State owned corporation, are not from the Northwest and Southwest Regions.

According to him, some incompetent and unscrupulous individuals may have forged Anglophone certificates to gain employment in Camair-Co. Sandjo spoke to The Post recently, after widespread reports tarnished the image of Anglophone employees at Camair-Co as being unqualified and incompetent.

It was widely reported that most Anglophones at Camair-Co were recruited without the required qualifications. But the GM said he was not aware of that. According to him, there are many workers at Camair-Co who were recruited without the required experience not qualification. “To some, this was their first job.”

Frederick Edimo’s Allegation

Sandjo was reacting to a comment made by his predecessor, Frederick Mbotto, in 2013 that the files of many Anglophones in the company were without copies of their certificates. Mbotto’s comment that Anglophones were not genuinely qualified, or had used ‘Kumba-made certificates’ to gain employment went viral on the media, when a correspondence written by the Board Chair of Camair-Co, Edouard Akame Mfoumou, to President Paul Biya, on April 6, 2015, on the situation of Camair-Co, leaked.

Defending the reason for the continuous recruitment of personnel by Camair-Co, despite the difficult financial situation of the company, the Board Chairman alleged that many of the workers who were recruited at the start of the company, especially Anglophones were incompetent.

The Camair-Co Board Chair said many of the workers from “the same cultural zone”, were recruited “essentially on the bases of linguistic proximity, without training or experience”. It was Edimo who raised the allegation that many Anglophones who were recruited at the beginning of Camair-Co by the management of Alex Van Elk were incompetent.

Inexperience Not Incompetent Personnel

Meanwhile, Nana Sandjo, an aviation expert, told The Post that what created problems for Camair-Co at the start was inexperience not incompetence.

“I don’t think there was a problem of workers without certificates at Camair-Co, rather, the problem was inexperience. You don’t recruit inexperience personnel to launch an airline,” Sandjo stressed. According to him, lack of experience by most workers seriously affected work in the company.

He admitted that the current management of Camair-Co has been forced to recruit more workers, who are former employees of the defunct Cameroon Airlines with working experience.

Article 8 of Decree No. 2006/293 of 11 September 2006 creating Camair-Co stated that priority in the recruitment of workers should be given to former personnel of Cameroon Airlines. Unfortunately, the then GM, Alex Van Elk and his close collaborators ignored the aforementioned article in the Presidential Decree.

Sandjo; told The Post that since Alex Van Elk and his management team that launched the airline were predominantly English speaking, they recruited more English speaking Cameroonians “and since many Francophone parents in Cameroon today send their children to English schools, it was wrong to assume that all the English speaking Cameroonians who were recruited at Camair-Co were bonafide Anglophone because there are some English speaking personnel at Camair-Co who hail from the West Region, should they be termed Anglophones.”