I took holidays in the first half of August, spending most of the time in Foumban in West Cameroon. August is not a good time for holidays in Cameroon since it is at the height of the rainy season but part of my logic was that anywhere is better than Maga in the rainy season. I have been lucky in that the rainy season was late this year and there were no really bad rains before I left. Such rains can make it impossible to go outside one’s house for several days because everywhere there is mud up to the knees. We have experienced some very violent storms in Maga with extremely heavy rains, making the local roads impassable and flooding the village, but fortunately they were usually followed by a sunny spell which dried the roads sufficiently for travel (one theory is that there is a progressive reduction in rainfall due to global warming, but on the other hand, Chad which is on the other side of the Logone, has had severe flooding this year). The more lasting effect of such storms has been disruption of the electricity supply, since poles are blown down or simply snap in the wind or are hit by lightning, also with disruption of the water supply (since the pumps are electric). On average we have had power and water around one-quarter of the time over the past few months. However I was very lucky with my holidays in that I left and returned to Maga in fine weather (there was a lot of rain while I was away) and the electricity was turned on a few hours before I returned.
Having escaped from Maga to Maroua I headed south to Yaounde and then to Douala. The journey to Yaounde was the reverse of my original journey to the Far North and the contrast was remarkable in that what had been virtual desert had turned green and rivers that had been dry were now flowing strongly. As we headed further south towards Yaounde the vegetation became lush and exotic. This intensified to something like tropical rain forest on the onward journey to Douala, which is close to an area reputed to have the greatest amount of rainfall of anywhere in the world.
Douala is the economic capital of Cameroon and is bigger than Yaounde. It is at the mouth of the Wouri river and has a large port. It is very industrial and is not a pleasant place in which to stay. Many of its districts have high levels of crime and are very dangerous. After spending two nights there we went to the bus station which serves West and North West Cameroon. When we arrived at the bus station a swarm of aggressive representatives of bus companies descended on us and practically fought each other over us. Eventually the winner took our luggage and put it on top of a bus and told us to get in. Such buses only leave when they are full and it became apparent that the bus was not filling quickly. Whenever prospective customers were spotted our driver started the engine and drove back and forth as if the bus was about to leave, so as to panic them into jumping in, but it took six hours to fill the bus. The journey took another six hours but we found out later that there are other, more expensive, bus companies whose buses leave at fixed times from central Douala, which do not pack so many people into the buses and which have fewer stops along the way.
North of Douala we drove through fertile countryside with lots of fruit and vegetables, including mangoes, pineapples, grapefruit, avocados, extensive plantations of palms, bananas and papayas, corn, millet, ground nuts and cotton. As we drove into the hills of West Cameroon we got an impression that life there is much easier than in the Far North. The fertile land supports many villages, the houses are reasonably solid rather than mud huts and cars and buses are much more plentiful and in much better condition.
If one looks at the map, it appears that one can get to Foumban much more directly by road from Ngaoundere. However the road is so bad that it is only passable in the dry season from November to February, and then with difficulty and some danger from bandits (even the bus on the busy road from Maroua to Ngaoundere had armed guards). One has to go south to Yaounde or Douala and then go back north to Foumban. The road from Ngaoundere to Yaounde is also bad (though passable most of the time) and most people and goods go by train. The effect of the bad roads is that the North and Far North are almost cut off from the South, West and North West. One consequence is that there is a far narrower range of fruit and vegetables in the North and Far North, the quality is lower and prices are much higher. Much of the fruit in the Far North comes from Nigeria. A good road from Foumban to Ngaoundere would open up the North and Far North to the foodstuffs of the West and North West, and also allow some trade in reverse, e.g. of rice.
There was an amazing number of police roadblocks between Douala and Foumban at which we had to stop, even more than in the Far North. In the latter case there is some financial exchange between the bus driver and the policeman (at least four times on the 80 kilometer journey between Maga and Maroua). In the West the bus probably would have passed a test of road worthiness and the documentation, including a list of passengers with their identity card numbers, was in order. Perhaps there were other vehicles for which it was worthwhile for the police to check, or perhaps in both cases the police act as a deterrent to bandits. It is possible also that the trouble in the neighbouring Bakassi Peninsula was the reason for the vigilance (the Bakassi Peninsula was disputed between Cameroon and Nigeria and although the International Court of Justice ruled that Nigeria should cede it to Cameroon in 2002 (the hand-over formally happened on 14th August 2008) there are armed groups which still resist Cameroonian rule, causing ongoing conflict in which over 100 people have died in the past month).
On the last leg of the bus journey, from Bafoussan to Foumban, a man got on the bus and gave a sales pitch on a number of Chinese medicines. In each case he looked for 15,000 fcfa but due to lack of response quickly dropped his price to 500 fcfa, sometimes adding bonus products at this price. The most popular product was a liquid which you held in your mouth for 10 minutes and which did all sorts of wonderful things such as healing gum disease and bad teeth. Somebody asked if it was any good for ear aches and the salesman immediately launched forth on the great benefits that it brought to the ears. I think it is indicative of the African belief in quick remedies that most people on the bus bought this product. His last product was a cream that is rubbed on the genitals to cure or prevent sexually transmitted diseases. There were a few takers for this product but it was not clear whether they needed a cure or just prevention.
When in Foumban I wanted to visit some VSO volunteers in two villages around 80 kilometers further north. I was told that the road is very dangerous in the rainy season, but what really killed the idea was news that some people had just been killed by bandits on that road.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
My Work
Decentralisation in Cameroon
The context of my work with the Maga Council is that Cameroon is in the process of devolving responsibilities from central to local government. The aspiration to do this has been around since the 1970s, there was a flurry of activity in the 1990s and in 2004 laws were published detailing such things as the responsibilities of the councils. The expanded services for which the councils are responsible include water and sanitation, local roads and infrastructure, primary education, local health services, town planning, development of local economic activity and local environmental issues. A law setting out how resources, both human and financial, are to be transferred from the state to the councils to enable them to fulfil their additional responsibilities has not yet been published and the 2004 laws have not yet been enacted. However the state has withdrawn somewhat from meeting local needs and the people look to the councils to meet their needs, which are acute.
Much good work has been done on the planning of decentralisation, mainly with technical assistance from the German equivalent of Irish Aid, supplemented by its Dutch and French counterparts and by financial assistance from these and the UK and Canadian governments. In the limbo created by the devolution of responsibilities without the corresponding transfer of resources, one constructive contribution would be to strengthen the capacities of the councils so that they may use their current resources as effectively as possible and be positioned to take on their extra responsibilities when resouces are made available. VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) for whom I work is one of a number of organisations which have adopted this response. VSO has already experience of strengthening the capacities of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and CSOs (civil society organisations) and with the help of local councils in Canada and Wales has adapted this process to the needs of the councils in Cameroon. The Maga Council is one of ten forming a pilot group, four of which have volunteers at this stage.
Strengthening Capacities
The capacities in question are such things as the ability to manage human resources, the leadership of the mayor and his executive, financial management, two-way communication between the council and its citizens, provision of or outsourcing of services, project formulation and management, and cooperation with state bodies and with international development organisations. The capacities are enablers of good governance, in which there is participation of all relevant individuals in decision making, clear allocation of responsibilities with accountability for carrying them out and transparent communication with availability of relevant information. I am currently in a diagnostic phase in Maga in which, with a working party of councillors and council employees, we are studying all available documentation on policies, procedures and standards relating to capacities and carrying out a large number of interviews with councillors, staff, representatives of state organisations, NGOs and CSOs. When these activities have been completed we will agree on how strong the council is on each capacity, present our findings to all councillors and staff and agree priorities for addressing the weak capacities. We will then propose a five-year plan for strengthening the capacities. VSO will work with the council over the five years and will bring in people with expertise appropriate to the proposed actions. The objective is to enable the council to do things such as planning and managing projects, rather than supply volunteers to do such things for it.
My work to date has included delivering workshops to describe the process we have embarked on, to explain the capacities and how they contribute to good governance and to highlight the need for good governance and that without good governance any projects initiated have a high likelihood of failure and of losing the confidence of international development organisations. The most important element of the workshops is a play which illustrates the need for each village to have a management committee to look after things like pump maintenance and charges for pump usage. When I visited villages, as described in an earlier blog, I was struck by the lack of good governance at village level and the futility of providing new facilities such as pumps in such circumstances. I decided that this was where we should start, rather than just concentrating on improving the capacities of the council, and rewrote the play proposed by VSO in this context. This message has been taken up by many of the councillors. They perceive the need to improve the governance of their villages and we now have requests to present the workshop to all the chiefs of the villages (at village level, the main power tends to reside in the chief who is appointed through traditional processes and is not necessarily, and not commonly, the elected councillor).
The Current State of Maga’s Council
The Maga council has 41 councillors elected by the people who in turn elected the mayor and his four deputies. The council meets once per quarter and delegates certain powers to the mayor, who in turn may delegate to his deputies. The council can form committees - in the case of Maga there are committees for finance, development and social affairs. The council also has employees, 18 in the case of Maga. The most important of these is the Secrétaire Général, who is essentially the chief executive (the mayor being the chairman). There is also a Receveur Municipal (a sort of financial controller) and a Comptable Matières (a sort of bean counter who keeps track of everything the council owns).
The reality in Maga is that most of the work is done by the mayor and the Secrétaire Général, who are extremely busy. The Receveur Municipal, some of the local tax collectors who report to him, and one or two others, also appear to do a moderate amount of work. Some others turn up at the office from time to time but just seem to chat, and some are rarely if ever seen. The concept of work here is very different from the Western concept. For example, on Tuesdays there is a market in neighbouring Pouss and while the tax collectors have a valid reason for going there, it seems to be accepted that everybody goes there and that there is really no need to turn up to work in Maga on that day.
One of the reasons for the inactivity of many employees is that the council is in severe financial crisis and there is no money for the materials needed for their work. The present council was elected in July 2007 and around that time also a new Secrétaire Général and Receveur Municipal were appointed. The new administration found that accounts had not been prepared for five years. This exacerbates a situation where taxes collected by the state but normally passed to councils (under pre-decentralisation legislation) are running several months late. Salaries of employees are around four months in arrears and because of the problem with the accounts the council is prevented from having recourse to short-term borrowing to pay them. This has resulted in severe hardship since the salaries are barely adequate for the very large families which are common here and the world food and fuel crises have increased prices dramatically. Employees of the council say that they have to find other ways of making money and don’t have time to come to work. The new administration has reconstructed the accounts for the past few years and is in the process of getting them approved.
The council building is somewhat run down. Most lights have no bulb, many of the electric sockets don’t work and there are air conditioning units, none of which works. The council has a PC, a printer and a photocopier but all are broken down, were sent to Maroua to be fixed around a year ago and there has been no follow-up. Even if these worked there is a need for a generator since the electricity supply is so unreliable. The council has a helicopter landing pad but no toilet (this is a big problem when I arrange a day-long workshop for a large number of people). I asked if helicopters often use the landing pad and was told that one landed in 1982 (I think it contained the previous president of Cameroon who performed the official opening of SEMRY and the lake). There is also an airstrip dating from those times but it is in disuse.
It is evident at this stage that in the case of Maga’s capacities, we are starting from a very low base indeed. No external organisation has ever worked with it on any of the relevant capacities. It is also clear that bringing about change in the Maga council will be very difficult indeed. The level of education of staff is very low, most having left school well short of completing the ‘bac’ (the equivalent in francophone Cameroon of A-levels in anglophone Cameroon, both of which mirror the French and English systems). While the staff all speak French, only around one-third of councillors speak French, the others speaking various local languages such as Mousgoum, Fulfulde and Arab Choa. Almost nobody speaks English. The multiplicity of languages makes workshops extremely challenging!
Barriers to Change
As indicated earlier, the state’s commitment to devolving power to councils under decentralisation is ambivalent. The state has a strangle-hold on the councils using a large cumbersome control organisation (the ‘tutelle’), starting with provinces and their Governors and ramifying down to structures at council level where the Sous-Préfet is the local strong man (as described in the blog on democracy in Cameroon). All significant decisions of the council have to be referred to the Sous-Préfet, and upwards by him, as appropriate (including the approval of the accounts). The Secrétaire Général, Receveur Municipal and Comptable Matières are state appointees and if the council needs to recruit staff with competencies such as third level qualifications it effectively has to look to the state to provide these also. This parallel structure is quite inappropriate under decentralisation but it is not clear what is to happen to it.
Cameroon has been rated by Transparency International as the most corrup country in the world in each of the last 10 years and one can only speculate on what vested interests might block the dismantling of the tutelle. Corruption is reputedly endemic also within councils (I don't have evidence of it in Maga). It is possible that dealing with resistance motivated by corruption will turn out to be the biggest challenge in strengthening the capacities of councils.
The context of my work with the Maga Council is that Cameroon is in the process of devolving responsibilities from central to local government. The aspiration to do this has been around since the 1970s, there was a flurry of activity in the 1990s and in 2004 laws were published detailing such things as the responsibilities of the councils. The expanded services for which the councils are responsible include water and sanitation, local roads and infrastructure, primary education, local health services, town planning, development of local economic activity and local environmental issues. A law setting out how resources, both human and financial, are to be transferred from the state to the councils to enable them to fulfil their additional responsibilities has not yet been published and the 2004 laws have not yet been enacted. However the state has withdrawn somewhat from meeting local needs and the people look to the councils to meet their needs, which are acute.
Much good work has been done on the planning of decentralisation, mainly with technical assistance from the German equivalent of Irish Aid, supplemented by its Dutch and French counterparts and by financial assistance from these and the UK and Canadian governments. In the limbo created by the devolution of responsibilities without the corresponding transfer of resources, one constructive contribution would be to strengthen the capacities of the councils so that they may use their current resources as effectively as possible and be positioned to take on their extra responsibilities when resouces are made available. VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) for whom I work is one of a number of organisations which have adopted this response. VSO has already experience of strengthening the capacities of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and CSOs (civil society organisations) and with the help of local councils in Canada and Wales has adapted this process to the needs of the councils in Cameroon. The Maga Council is one of ten forming a pilot group, four of which have volunteers at this stage.
Strengthening Capacities
The capacities in question are such things as the ability to manage human resources, the leadership of the mayor and his executive, financial management, two-way communication between the council and its citizens, provision of or outsourcing of services, project formulation and management, and cooperation with state bodies and with international development organisations. The capacities are enablers of good governance, in which there is participation of all relevant individuals in decision making, clear allocation of responsibilities with accountability for carrying them out and transparent communication with availability of relevant information. I am currently in a diagnostic phase in Maga in which, with a working party of councillors and council employees, we are studying all available documentation on policies, procedures and standards relating to capacities and carrying out a large number of interviews with councillors, staff, representatives of state organisations, NGOs and CSOs. When these activities have been completed we will agree on how strong the council is on each capacity, present our findings to all councillors and staff and agree priorities for addressing the weak capacities. We will then propose a five-year plan for strengthening the capacities. VSO will work with the council over the five years and will bring in people with expertise appropriate to the proposed actions. The objective is to enable the council to do things such as planning and managing projects, rather than supply volunteers to do such things for it.
My work to date has included delivering workshops to describe the process we have embarked on, to explain the capacities and how they contribute to good governance and to highlight the need for good governance and that without good governance any projects initiated have a high likelihood of failure and of losing the confidence of international development organisations. The most important element of the workshops is a play which illustrates the need for each village to have a management committee to look after things like pump maintenance and charges for pump usage. When I visited villages, as described in an earlier blog, I was struck by the lack of good governance at village level and the futility of providing new facilities such as pumps in such circumstances. I decided that this was where we should start, rather than just concentrating on improving the capacities of the council, and rewrote the play proposed by VSO in this context. This message has been taken up by many of the councillors. They perceive the need to improve the governance of their villages and we now have requests to present the workshop to all the chiefs of the villages (at village level, the main power tends to reside in the chief who is appointed through traditional processes and is not necessarily, and not commonly, the elected councillor).
The Current State of Maga’s Council
The Maga council has 41 councillors elected by the people who in turn elected the mayor and his four deputies. The council meets once per quarter and delegates certain powers to the mayor, who in turn may delegate to his deputies. The council can form committees - in the case of Maga there are committees for finance, development and social affairs. The council also has employees, 18 in the case of Maga. The most important of these is the Secrétaire Général, who is essentially the chief executive (the mayor being the chairman). There is also a Receveur Municipal (a sort of financial controller) and a Comptable Matières (a sort of bean counter who keeps track of everything the council owns).
The reality in Maga is that most of the work is done by the mayor and the Secrétaire Général, who are extremely busy. The Receveur Municipal, some of the local tax collectors who report to him, and one or two others, also appear to do a moderate amount of work. Some others turn up at the office from time to time but just seem to chat, and some are rarely if ever seen. The concept of work here is very different from the Western concept. For example, on Tuesdays there is a market in neighbouring Pouss and while the tax collectors have a valid reason for going there, it seems to be accepted that everybody goes there and that there is really no need to turn up to work in Maga on that day.
One of the reasons for the inactivity of many employees is that the council is in severe financial crisis and there is no money for the materials needed for their work. The present council was elected in July 2007 and around that time also a new Secrétaire Général and Receveur Municipal were appointed. The new administration found that accounts had not been prepared for five years. This exacerbates a situation where taxes collected by the state but normally passed to councils (under pre-decentralisation legislation) are running several months late. Salaries of employees are around four months in arrears and because of the problem with the accounts the council is prevented from having recourse to short-term borrowing to pay them. This has resulted in severe hardship since the salaries are barely adequate for the very large families which are common here and the world food and fuel crises have increased prices dramatically. Employees of the council say that they have to find other ways of making money and don’t have time to come to work. The new administration has reconstructed the accounts for the past few years and is in the process of getting them approved.
The council building is somewhat run down. Most lights have no bulb, many of the electric sockets don’t work and there are air conditioning units, none of which works. The council has a PC, a printer and a photocopier but all are broken down, were sent to Maroua to be fixed around a year ago and there has been no follow-up. Even if these worked there is a need for a generator since the electricity supply is so unreliable. The council has a helicopter landing pad but no toilet (this is a big problem when I arrange a day-long workshop for a large number of people). I asked if helicopters often use the landing pad and was told that one landed in 1982 (I think it contained the previous president of Cameroon who performed the official opening of SEMRY and the lake). There is also an airstrip dating from those times but it is in disuse.
It is evident at this stage that in the case of Maga’s capacities, we are starting from a very low base indeed. No external organisation has ever worked with it on any of the relevant capacities. It is also clear that bringing about change in the Maga council will be very difficult indeed. The level of education of staff is very low, most having left school well short of completing the ‘bac’ (the equivalent in francophone Cameroon of A-levels in anglophone Cameroon, both of which mirror the French and English systems). While the staff all speak French, only around one-third of councillors speak French, the others speaking various local languages such as Mousgoum, Fulfulde and Arab Choa. Almost nobody speaks English. The multiplicity of languages makes workshops extremely challenging!
Barriers to Change
As indicated earlier, the state’s commitment to devolving power to councils under decentralisation is ambivalent. The state has a strangle-hold on the councils using a large cumbersome control organisation (the ‘tutelle’), starting with provinces and their Governors and ramifying down to structures at council level where the Sous-Préfet is the local strong man (as described in the blog on democracy in Cameroon). All significant decisions of the council have to be referred to the Sous-Préfet, and upwards by him, as appropriate (including the approval of the accounts). The Secrétaire Général, Receveur Municipal and Comptable Matières are state appointees and if the council needs to recruit staff with competencies such as third level qualifications it effectively has to look to the state to provide these also. This parallel structure is quite inappropriate under decentralisation but it is not clear what is to happen to it.
Cameroon has been rated by Transparency International as the most corrup country in the world in each of the last 10 years and one can only speculate on what vested interests might block the dismantling of the tutelle. Corruption is reputedly endemic also within councils (I don't have evidence of it in Maga). It is possible that dealing with resistance motivated by corruption will turn out to be the biggest challenge in strengthening the capacities of councils.
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