In a culture where corruption is endemic, a bigger market just means bigger opportunities to skim off the top.
Cameroonians are not just naturally more corrupt than other people, nor is it an exceptionally immoral culture. The corruption is a system, and it’s a self-perpetuating one that goes beyond individual actions.
For example, to become a policeman requires a bribe of about US $10,000. In a country where half the population lives on a dollar a day, this is an enormous sum. Usually a family will rally around one of their brighter sons, with the entire extended family giving literally everything they have to give him a shot. In return, of course, he will be expected to keep the family going. He may be the sole sourse of cash (as opposed to tradeable goods- which can’t pay for medicine or school fees) for a family of thirty people. Because the government doesn’t actually pay policemen particularly well or particularly consistently, bribes will become a part of his reality. There is no other way to recoup his family’s investment.
The lone wolf who decides to buck the system will achieve nothing. All they will do is screw themselves and their family over. In fact, my school was a bit of a purgatory for teachers who could not keep up with their “financial obligations” to various officials. Rather than being posted to schools near their homes, they were sent to the distant north, with a completely foreign culture, language, poltical system, and living conditions (120 degrees in the shade!). They were expected to live there, at least three days of hard and expensive travel on dirt roads from their families, completely alone. They continually encountered “paperwork errors” that could only be corrected in the capitol, which they could not afford to go to much less afford the “fees” to set things right. Everyone was in a desperate quest to get the hell out of there. Nobody is going to do this voluntarily just to prove a point.
Likewise, choosing not to play isn’t a great option. What are you going to do if you shrug off the only sources of salaries in the country? Farm cassava for the rest of your life? What is that going to prove? What are you going to make better stuck in the village with no cash?
That said, it’s not hopeless. It’s a young country that only got a start as a modern state 52 years ago, when there was only a handful of college graduates in the entire country, a skeletal infrastructure, and a very unsustainable political system (the French basically armed some traditional leaders and said “Here is the deal- bring us X amount of goods from the surrounding population to the regional outpost every Y months. How you achieve this up to you. If you fail, we’ll just arm the guy in next town over and put him in charge. Good luck!”)
Cameroon came into the modern world completely unprepared, and unsurprisingly it’s a long and painful proccess to get something that works. But Africa on the whole is booming, and democracy is a reality in more and more African states. The Cold War dictators are dying off, and along with them are the ridiculous real politk systems that used to run Africa. The great powers are realizing that African states are more lucrative as trade partners than vassels, and China is lighing a fire under everyone’s ass to start offering Africa something they could actually use before China does.
We have a veritable flood of illegal immigrants and so called “Asylum seekers” from all over the world anyway, as does all the other countries of Western Europe.
There were a lot of widespread, not entirely joking comments before the Olympics even started about how many of the members of Third World teams would actually return home after the event was over.
I would not be stunned with amazement if the team members befriended less attractive female British citizens, living on welfare, in Social Housing, while in pre Olympic training, and have moved in with them.
A few babies down the road and then they’ll be telling H.M.G. about how they were oppressed at home, were secretly in opposition to the government all of the time, etc. etc.
It seems to be the most used tactic by illegal, economic migrants in recent years.
Never heard of this. Can someone elaborate, please?
Booming? That is an interesting word to use. Maybe in terms of population growth (to double to 2 billion by 2050), but otherwise it sounds pretty dire:
Also, see this Atlantic article - ‘The Coming Anarchy’.
I’m not familiar with that area of London, but the Barceloneta (the area around Barcelona’s Olympic Village) looks like Buckingham Palace when you put it side-by-side with much of Africa. Working toilets, lifts, ceilings and walls which don’t need to be fixed constantly… yes, there are working toilets and buildings with lifts and skyscrapers in Africa - but the people jumping on pateras across the Med didn’t come from the skyscrapers.
Many subsaharians in Spain are now trying to “marry in”; their seduction methods are far from the subtlest. Fake marriages apparently were a booming business for a short time; not marriages of convenience, but using data from a single woman who wasn’t involved in the scheme at all (in one case, a woman’s data had been used in three separate false marriages).
How on Earth could that even work? :dubious: Marriage based immigration requires endless forms and in person interviews with both people, photo IDs(passports) are produced and looked at. How do you do that with stolen info?
Hmmm… a dead link and a ~20 year old article about “‘the rapid?’ destruction of planetary social fabric”. Your links are shit.
Here’s a different take from the economist [
](Africa rising) Not surprizing since this year all African economies are showing growth[
](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5icEvzhAq1varpn8K3dug8wQMvABA?docId=CNG.423038fc3e3ce0258de5e74aa8dc5376.2f1)To Lusty/Chen: Oh, and yes Africa is demographically growing too. Pretty soon “they’ll” be sneaking in your cities marring your “ugly” women-folk. :rolleyes:
What is preventing Cameroon from improving? I have the (perhaps naive) notion that unless there are negative forces (e.g. government oppression, war, resource scarcity, or racial problems) that a society will slowly get better. It doesn’t sound like the crime or corruption is so bad as to make things worse. Am I reading it wrong?
Now you are getting into development theory, which is a world of academic research of it’s own. The two major camps are “modernization theory” and “dependency theory.”
Modernization theory, which is basically what you put out there, is that the world is on a general march of progress, and economic development is mostly about developing countries “catching up.” Dependency theory is based on ideas that the economic progress of developed countries relies on systems that contribute to underdevelopment in other countries, and that these systems will have to be re-imagined before the poorest countries can catch up. A simplistic example might be that Britain relied on cotton grown by forced labor in its colonies to get the raw materials at a price cheap enough to kick start the British industrial revolution.
Pure dependency theory is largely discredited, but most people recognize there is some truth to the basic concepts. As with most things, the truth probably lies somewhere between the extremes. Bill Easterly, one of the better regarded theorists (and a notorious aid skeptic) explains this as a series of “traps,” where a certain amount of poverty creates a self-perpetuating cycle that can be hard for a country to break. For example, high infant mortality may lead to increased birthrates, which leads to decreased education, which leads to high infant mortality.
In any case, Cameroon has a few strikes against it right now. One is that the political system is so uncertain that it discourages foreign investment. Would you invest in Cameroon? Nobody is sure what the government of the country will look like five years from now, and so people are reluctant to trust that their investment won’t disappear. Without investment, it’s hard for a country to become a part of the modern economic system. A country can’t really go it alone. What foreign economic activity does happen is largely guided by France, which frankly does not give the most favorable terms.
Health is a major issue. HIV isn’t as big of a problem as it is in some parts of Africa, but it still takes a toll on what should be workers in their prime. Malaria takes a massive, massive toll on productivity. Most working adults spend a month or so out of the year with reoccurring malaria, which creates and economic hit. High infant mortality encourages high birthrates. And health problems leads people to spend their money on drugs, transportation and hospital fees rather than education, investment or other productive purchases.
Finally, infrastructure is poor, especially the roads. They literally this year paved the one road that connects the capital and southern regions to the rest of the country. The transportation infrastructure does not support internal trade. I lived in the north (picture a country the size of California) and I’d go months without seeing fruit. In the meantime, the south was literally swimming in delicious fruit that would be sold for a song. A scrawny, half-fermented pineapple in my village would be seen a few times a year in the market for around $2.50. A few hundred miles to the south, pineapples were sold ten per dollar, with unsold pineapples rotting the field. A huge portion of the yearly agricultural output is lost to spoilage due to poor infrastructure.
Then there are a host of other problems- an antiquated colonial education system unfit for today’s realities, soil degradation, desertification and deforestation, unstable neighbors, a diversity of genuinely harsh climates from impenetrable rainforest to full-on desert, increased global polarization of religion, and so on.
But there is hope, too. When I left, the nearest internet cafe to my town was four hours away on an unpaved road. Now my former students are contacting me on facebook. Cameroon is only 52 years old, and it started out with next to nothing. History shows us that making a nation is a tough process, and it takes a while to start getting things right. If you were looking at the US right in the middle of the war of 1812, you might say “OMG this nation is screwed!” but mostly we just had some things we had to work out, which didn’t really get worked out until the civil war, and eventually things started to gel.
Thanks even sven, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions. It’s very interesting.
Seconded. Before this, Cameroon was only a gag in Trading Places for me.
even sven, it sounds like the Anglophone provinces of Cameroon may actually be a bit better-governed than most of Nigeria. Nigeria was an English colony was well - what do you think made for the difference? Is it just that the oil and minerals gave them a nasty case of the resource curse?
Anglophone Cameroon has the advantage of being a united minority (and thus relatively homogenous) with some shared interests in a small area. It’s a small group with a fairly common vision.
Nigeria, on the other hand, is an enormous and densely populated state full of different groups with different interests and very little to unify them. And, they got a nice stash of unequally distributed natural resources to fight over. It’s like comparing Singapore with India. One is small and cohesive, the other has a pile of problems on its hands.
That said, Nigeria gets a bit of a bad rap. Yes, it is dangerous and often unstable. But it’s got a rising middle class, education systems, a place in the international economy, etc. From an African perspective, it’s seen as a powerhouse. A shady, often criminal powerhouse, but definitely not a horrible place. I think it occupies a lot of the same mental space as much of Latin America a couple decades ago.
It wasn’t marriage-based immigration as you’re thinking of it, marry and then come over, or come over as a spouse-to-be. It was immigrants who were already in the country, getting civil marriages where the woman was using fake ID using data from actual, single Spanish women: a civil marriage between a national and a foreigner (or even between two foreigners) involves proof of identity and proof that both parties are single but it doesn’t involve Immigration at all. In the case of the woman whose information was used three times, it was in a very short period of time and in three different provinces: when the lists of new marriages got cross-referenced (which doesn’t happen daily), “her” three lit up a red bulb about the size of Times Square.
Left something out: if one or both parties are foreigners, then the marriage has to be acceptable according to their country’s laws.
For example, in Spain the minimum age to marry is lower than in some other countries: a foreigner who was above Spain’s minimum age but below that in their country would not be able to marry in Spain.
Heck, United Airlines flies to Lagos now, so how bad could it be?