Crime against youth!

The Minister for Youth Affairs and Civic Education has recently taken serious sanctions against some erring members of staff of the ministry.

The worrying thing about this development is the fact that those sanctioned are senior officials occupying senior-level positions and who should serve as an example for many to follow.

Moreover, they are all being booked for playing hanky-panky with public funds, as if unaware of the government resolve taken a few years ago by the Head of State to secure the rare government treasury resources by sending to jail all those guilty of playing around with state funds.

The Minister formally removed them from the positions they held, but one can imagine that there is still much to come by way of judiciary enquiries which, if conclusive, can see these people going to jail.

Another disturbing thing about these cases of embezzlement is the fact that they were carried out by the same people supposed to be addressing youth problems and when one knows – not even better than the accused – how worrying are youth problems in the country, one can only doubt further about the unpatriotic nature of the acts posed by these reckless office holders.

It is almost as if one is given food to take to hungry children and before the hungry children, the messenger eats the food, further exacerbating the anger of the children. These civil servants are all of the ministry and obviously know how serious youth unemployment is as a national problem requiring the utmost answers.

Could it be that, as public perception has it, that the current fight against graft is only limited to officials of the higher rungs of the State’s administrative and political hierarchy? Probably so, because so far the best cases of those booked for embezzlement have been from this select class.

But even then there are lots of other cases that go unnoticed probably because they do not necessarily attract the media interest generated by the catch of “big fish”.

May be the decision by the Minister for Youth Affairs should sound like a warning bell to those who think it is the neighbour operating in wrongdoing.

The fight against corruption is a robust cooperation to rid our nation of greedy and unpatriotic citizens who care very little about using the rare resources at the nation’s disposal for such general interest projects as schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure.

As President Paul Biya noted in Kribi during the laying of the foundation stone for that city’s deep sea port in October 2011, each time a public official steals money, each citizen should feel concerned because it is all our money which could have been used for vital and, sometimes life-saving development projects, that is stolen.

The Minister’s decision must be particularly praised. Other colleagues in government ought to do same because all too often, the general feeling is that, in spite of all the powers they wield Ministers do not act with the required promptitude to ensure that vote-holders fear mistaking government money for theirs!

If there were a generalized approach to tracking culprits, the practice of stealing government money will end or, at least see some regression.