These old people who still hang around…

The majority of young people in Cameroon are intractably caught in a hassle. Those of them who are employed cannot aspire for important leadership positions because old men who ought to be on retirement are still sprawling over them.

School-goers have come to understand, dolefully, that eternally trumpeted statements such as “the youths are the leaders of tomorrow” and phrases like “land of promise, land of glory” are sheer platitudes, for the same reason evoked above. If young workers and students are squirming in such despondency, then the expectation of the unemployed to see light at the end of the tunnel is nothing short of a pipedream.

Come to think of it; leadership in Cameroon is so tasty that those who have been in it for donkey’s years don’t want to quit the stage. Most of the barons who are calling the shots today are people who have been on the podium since the 1960s and 1970s. Focus here is on those holding leadership positions in public offices. By the time they were in their mid and late 20s, they were ministers and all what not. And they proved their mettle. Today they are in their 70s and 80s and 90s and don’t want to cede their positions to competent younger people who also have their mettle to prove.

Ask any of such groggily ageing men why they hold tenaciously to their positions and they will tell you that the younger people are not competent enough to step into their shoes. In fact, one of them actually said this to me recently when I put the question to him. The revulsion that his answer provoked in me almost caused me to commit a sacrilege: spit on his face. But the positive side of my temperament was wide awake. Thank God. So I simply walked away.

In a poem contained in his book Before I Die, this writer, addressing an octogenarian potentate who stubbornly holds on to power, quips:

You will bear with me, dear respectable Sage

That performance clearly drops at old age

Thus at this retirement age you must go

You must not make yourself a come-no-go…

If it is universally acknowledged that performance drops at old age, how on earth could a man muster the courage to say those to take over their leadership mantle are not yet there? It is a foolish reechoing of Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Amah’s idea that “the beautyful ones are not yet born”, isn’t it? Were these old people magicians in their 20s and 30s to have manned their respective offices with adroitness? In a world that is fast evolving, don’t they think the young people of nowadays are even better equipped to propel our country to emergence (not necessarily by 2035) than they were in the past and are now?

There is no question that they are motivated to still hang around by greed and avarice, and the fear of the unknown. They are everything but the true patriots they claim to be. If they had their way, they would privatise Cameroon and die with it so that their survivors should be left with nothing to write home about.

Shame on them! They can be fooling some of us now, but they cannot fool all of us all the time. It behoves them to peruse the poem partially quoted above, in its entirety, some of whose lines read:

If you insistently tell us you are not tired

I bet you, you will invite the people’s ire

For decades, we’ve held you in reverence

We’ve watched you for long with patience

Leave the stage when the applause is loudest

Don’t be the bird that crumbles with his nest

Count yourself lucky for being counselled

Others in their sleep have been pumelled

There is a popular African adage which goes thus: “When the cow eats, the calf watches its mouth.” It is therefore not surprising that some other Cameroonians who hold influential positions in public offices are faithfully copying the folly of these men of the third age. They do so by asking some of their colleagues who are due retirement to stay on despite the existence of more energetic, enthusiastic and talented young professionals in the structures in question.

Isn’t this is a glaring case of divide and rule? Why should some people go on retirement at 55 and others of the same profession, many of whom are perfect examples of where practice does not make perfect, don’t?

This commentary is not meant to run down our older compatriots whose efforts in the advancement of Cameroon cannot be underestimated. It is rather a plea for them to think rightly and do what is expected of them, still in a bid to move our country forward. At a time when they should be having a well-deserved rest, it is in their best interest to step aside and serve more as consultants, for they may now have the brain but not the brawn to be optimally productive.