Plus the whole culture shock of suddenly being in a nation where the per capita GDP is 30 times your homeland and you’re in a big, wealthy cultural melting pot surrounded by athletes from every nation (having sex outside your room…)
Do you really want to go home to Shitville? :dubious:
What kind of visa does an Olympic athlete have? When would one be considered to have overstayed?
Athletes competing in London are on a special Olympics and Paralympics UK visa. They’re good for up to six months, depending on country of origin. Not sure how long Cameroonian ones are good for.
The article points out that it’s really more like three defections. The first two defections were individuals but the third defection was five guys who were all in the same sport and left as a group. I assume they heard the first two people and started planning among their group.
I read that this is not the first time this has happened with Cameroonian athletes so it makes me wonder…
When these people are being chosen to go to the Olympics, are they being encouraged by their coaches to skip out? I would imagine various governments have minders looking after their athletes otherwise you’d hear more about the North Koreans etc. deciding not to go home. So does this mean there’s some Cameroonian official who is telling these guys “Hey, once you get to London just quietly walk out of the Olympic Village and don’t look back. It’s your best shot at getting out of here!”
The North Koreans are very anxious to make sure that none of their athletes try this. They assign “minders” to babysit each athlete 24/7, refuse to allow them to leave the Olympic Village for sightseeing or anything else, and talking to athletes from other countries is strictly forbidden.
I wonder if Cameroon is taking notes?
I can believe it.
I moved to a country where the average per capita income in 15,000 USD per year and at least every few months someone will tell me I am flat out crazy for living here, you are crazy grude! Even though it is temporary they are like think of the money you are missing out on not being in the USA!
My wife is told she won the lottery marrying me, multiple people have told her that and she doesn’t even really want to live in the USA.
I bet that sentiment in Cameroon is about fifteen times stronger.
CNN.com’s take on the situation: http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/10/world/africa/olympics-cameroon-missing-athletes/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
$15K per year is actually not at all that bad, on the scale of things.
I moved from the USA to the Republic of Georgia (per capital income was about $2000). Lots of people were trying to leave, mostly to Turkey. For me it was different since I could leave anytime I wanted to. It is no surprise that people in Cameroon might be looking for ways to leave. While I have never been to Cameroon, I have been to Sudan and D.R. Congo which are in the same ballpark economically. Yeah, lots of people would love to be in the UK.
Maybe they’ve run out of beef jerky.
But don’t they get a lot of that is to do with the Olympic Park atmosphere? I may be very very jaded but the area surrounding the Olypmic Park is frankly not very prosperous at all (and even not very clean tbh) - but did they see it I wonder? I’ve no idea
North Korean atheletes probably have their families as hostages. Then again, Kim Jong Un totally seems to me to be very different to his father. Just look at his Japanese chef returning!
Do you mind if I ask which country?
What I don’t get is why almost all immigrants stay in the south east. I get that’s where the jobs are, but once they’ve got the money it’s basically the worst part.
I’m aware of three other immigrant “hotspots”, which are Pakistani/Bangladeshi in west yorkshire, Jews in Gateshead, and “misc” around Birmingham. While I reckon the Brimingham thing is even worse, the other two make more sense to me.
Trinidad&Tobago, do a GIS for Port Of Spain to see the capital. It is for most intents and purposes a developed nation, in fact the average per capita income is higher than I thought.
My point was that even here there is a strong sentiment that you’d have to be nuts not to seize a chance to go to the USA or UK and work, I can’t imagine how strong that sentiment is in Cameroon.
A few thoughts.
Cameroon isn’t the worst place on earth, but it is poor. How poor varies a lot. You can be anything from “emerging middle class” poor, where you live in a concrete block house with tile to “outright poor” where you live in a mud hut you built yourself with a gravel floor and no furniture besides a mat to “completely screwed” as a political prisoner or traditional slave or trafficked woman. Half of the country lives on less than a dollar a day. People rarely outright starve, but nobody is that far removed from the village with high infant mortality, endemic malaria, and overall malnutrition. Where I lived, for example, rice was considered a luxury that you might get on your birthday or a holiday, and a few cubes of meat was a once-a-week treat.
I think what really gets people, however, is the lack of opportunity. Living conditions have declined steadily, especially in the past few decades. Roads have degraded and towns that had once been connected to the world are now isolated from trade and transport for entire seasons. Health problems that were once under control are now raging. And things just break, sometimes forever. For example, the rather large (50,000+) city I lived near had a water outage (a regular occurrence) and after that half of the city lost water at night. And that’s just it- the water is gone. Everyone starts filling up buckets in the afternoon now.
It’s hard to really picture how unindustrialized a country can be. Cameroon manufactures maybe 50 products- yogurt, a brand of chocolate bar, cubes of soap, a low-grade Nutella knock-off, etc. And that’s it. If you go to a store you will see that, a few stray products from Unilever’s developing world line (soaps, mostly), fabric, and some Chinese plastic junk. That’s it. Everything else- from clothing to bicycles, you have to make yourself. Blacksmiths make knives and farm implements and wheelchairs. Any rare bicycle that strays into the country is repaired for decades. Cobblers make shoes, and repair the cheap plastic flip flops. People even stitch up the dried gourds that serve as dishware when they crack.
Without industry, there aren’t jobs. Maybe 10-20% of the population has what we would call a job- something where you show up for work and get paid on a regular basis. These are almost all government jobs and a handful of jobs with foreign NGOs. Even then, the steady wages may be low and you’ll be expected to collect bribes to make ends meet. Teachers, for example, are not paid for their first two years of service, and often find themselves in paperwork “mix-ups” that require lengthy and expensive visits to the capital to resolve (as in, you have to spend a few months in the capital trying to figure out who to bribe to get the paychecks flowing again.) Everyone else scrambles for money however they can- farming, small trading, cottage industries, and labor. This is a place where you buy you cigarettes one at a time, and you may even need to buy your garlic one clove at a time.
Politics are not great. The same guy has been president for thirty years, and he’s basically just calling it in now. His “governance” is checking his bank balance now and then from his Paris mansion. Nobody likes the guy and everyone is pissed to see their country decline, but people are also very realistic about what change means. Change would lead to almost certain civil war along Cameroon’s many rifts, and nobody wants to see that. Nor is anyone very optimistic that change would bring about anything more than a different dictator who may be even worse. So for the most part, people keep quiet about politics, pay their bribes, hope for the best, and try not to think about the future.
What this adds up to is that for a young ambitious person, there just isn’t a lot there. if you aren’t politically connected, you aren’t getting those government jobs. The life ahead of you is steady unemployment, mild political oppression, general stagnation, and a pretty good likelihood of early death from a completely preventable disease. Added to that is that it’s a very family-oriented society, and every family hopes to turn out at least one actually employed person who can provide hard cash for the whole family. My teacher friends often send 90% of their paycheck back home to pay for siblings and cousin’s school fees, medical costs, and daily living costs for a huge extended family. Many families survive only on the largesse of a distant cousin who is a policeman on the other side of the country.
Cameroonians can be very quick to take advantage of opportunity. The country has a lot of “hustle” to it, and everyone is trying to make a buck to get through the day. I wasn’t all all surprised to hear of the athletes absconding. It’s a tough country, and you learn that if you have any shot at opportunity you have to take it, because that might be the only chance you get.
I imagine most of the athletes will make their way over to Paris, where there is a thriving Cameroonian community. There are still strong bonds between the countries, and plenty of Cameroonians are back and forth- think of it like something along the lines of the US and Mexico. Cameroonians have grown up pretty imbued with French culture, especially in the south, and I doubt they’d be very amazed by the streets of Europe. Paris is the backdrop of just about every Cameroonian music video on the market!
Thanks, even sven. What’s the crime situation? What precautions do people have to take?
And are there any rising political figures who might make a difference?
Street crime is a presence, but it’s generally focused on opportunistic property crimes and violent attacks are relatively rare. I wouldn’t wander around my town alone at night, but I would comfortably take a motorcycle taxi after dark from a restaurant. Like most middle-class people, I had a guard to watch my house while I was away, but again that was more to guard against random opportunists rather than a sign of me living in fear. I felt about as secure as you might feel in a relatively poor US urban area. You are aware of the risks, but it’s not something that really is the focus of your life or anything. You can probably expect to have your house robbed and to get mugged at some point, but you aren’t ever really scared for your life or safety.
Road bandits are an issue along some routes, and public transport sometimes travels with armed protection. The road bandits have specific targets (they often focus on nomadic herders returning from the cattle markets after making a large cash sale.) These guys could be dangerous, but could generally be avoided by travelling in the day and keeping your ear on the gossip. Now and then the police or a citizen’s group would catch a batch and summarily execute them. Justice could be fast and harsh.
Poltical violence was rare, but it did happen. There were some riots in 2007 and violence related to local elections is not uncommon. There are a lot of ways to divide Cameroonian society, and some of these bubble up into violence, but I think that is also a saving grace. There are too many ways for Cameroon to fracture, and that keeps any group from uniting enough to cause too much real trouble.
Paul Biya has not chosen a successor, and that is a part of what is making people so nervous. The man is in his 80s, and he hasn’t said a peep about what happens next. I think the people would accept whoever he transferred power to (within reason) with relatively little disruption. But he, for whatever reason, hasn’t done that.
Fascinating, thanks. And are there any rising political figures who might make a difference?
Not that I know of. There are opposition parties, but my understanding is that they are too fragmented to have much power outside of their regional strongholds.
Anglophone Cameroon, for example, has a fairly strong succession movement. These two provinces (out of 10, total) were given the option at independence to join Cameroon or Nigeria. They chose Cameroon under the theory that it was better to be a larger minority of a smaller country than a smaller minority in a larger country. Anglophone Cameroon maintains a lot of British legacy- they have a British influenced school system and provincial government. On the whole, Anglophone Cameroon is a lot more orderly and functional. British colonialism emphasized building a functioning bureaucracy, while the French focused on indirect rule (using traditional leaders as proxies) and didn’t build much beyond heavily fortified regional offices and a skeletal road system connecting them. This was how things were up until the 1960s, and it shows. Francophone Cameroon still doesn’t have the infrastructure or trained personnel to really be governed well.
All of this would be fine, except that Cameroon turned out to be a stagnant mess, while Nigeria found oil and become a booming and prosperous regional power (we regarded Nigeria as being a heaven of jobs, manufactured goods, and cheap Coca-Cola.) Anglophone Cameroonians are pretty unhappy that they traded a chance at prosperity to become a politically powerless and occasionally actively oppressed backwater in a country whose growth has been massively underwhelming. And all of this despite being the two provinces who can really manage to get their act in order enough to run a decent school system, attempt to maintain their infrastructure, bring in tourists, have a reasonably fair justice system, and otherwise be a functioning state. Many Anglophones feel they would be better off going it alone- and they would be.
But as strong as these parties are in Anglophone, they hold no appeal for people in, say, the Muslim north (which has its own opposition parties). So nobody has much of a chance of rising to power outside of their region, and those that do are easy enough to pick off (kill, throw in jail, bribe into exile, etc.)
In any case, outside of Anglophone, Cameroonians generally don’t like to talk about politics. It’s depressing, and it’s an easy way to get killed. People would largely rather let the people in Yaounde do their thing, and just pray to god that it doesn’t affect their lives.
I see. Thanks again. Here’s hoping for better days for Cameroon, and soon.
I can now understand the frustration of people who have gotten a university degree, in a place like Cameroon-no jobs, no hope, no future. Which is why I question if any of these sub-Saharan African states will ever develop manufacturing economies-the Chinese can always make it cheaper, and an indigenous industry has no real economies of scale. Places like Nigeria are not a lot better-though they have the oil money, most of it enriches the corrupt few at the top. It is too bad that African countries could not unit in some common trade agreement-at least they would have a larger market for local firms.
all, in all, understandable why bright, ambitious people want to leave.