By Dr. Peter Mbile
By Dr. Peter Mbile
*Demolition is not about buildings*
Whenever I mention the idea of a “controlled demolition” as the first step toward building a viable and harmonious Cameroon, the reflex reaction is predictable: people think of bulldozers knocking down houses or, worse, of one group trying to erase another. That misinterpretation is precisely the problem. We see demolition only in physical, material, or tribal terms: us versus them, me versus him, our village versus theirs.
But the demolition I am calling for is not about structures of cement and brick. It is about dismantling the toxic architecture of the Cameroonian mindset. Unless this parochial, materialist, and competitive mentality is taken apart, carefully, deliberately, and systematically, our nation will remain a showroom of superficial prosperity: glittering on the outside, hollow on the inside.
*The village in the Nation-state*
Cameroon is nearly half a million square kilometers in size, with about 30 million people and over 200 ethnic groups. Yet we still think like members of one large, quarrelsome village.
Our conversations, whether at home or abroad, almost always shrink to: Whose son has the better job? Whose daughter married the richer man?
How many houses has our tribesman built in Yaoundé or Douala?
Other nations count industrial plants, patents, or Nobel laureates. We, by contrast, count hotel floors, family plots in Fako, or the number of Ministers from “our” village. We behave as if national development were a tribal scorecard.
*The Minister and the Mason*
Take this absurdity: in Cameroon, a cabinet minister with access to the nation’s purse is often in direct competition with a mason from his village. The race?
Who has more houses in Kumba. Who has the bigger hotel in Limbe. Who owns more plots in Kribi. Who can stage the fancier leisure center.
When civil servants, paid to manage national wealth, compete with ordinary citizens in this grotesque Olympics of materialism, what kind of development is possible?
I once asked a civil servant about collaborating with a Minister to launch a community project that could create jobs. His reply was chilling in its simplicity: “He will not help you.” Why?
“Because he already has everything, plots, money, women, houses.” Everything? How can any mortal, in any society, ever have everything? And more crucially: when did the purpose of leadership shrink to piling up “everything” while denying a signature for something as basic as youth employment or innovation?
*The mirage of prosperity*
This mindset explains why Cameroon, from afar, looks prosperous, shiny hotels, palatial villas, luxury cars, flamboyant weddings. But scratch the surface and you see something else: hospitals without medicine, schools without books, industries without innovation, rural roads that melt in the rain, and an entire generation of youth locked out of opportunity.
It is a society that consumes itself in me versus him, us versus them. Instead of building the nation, we build fences of envy, fortresses of material competition, and monuments to self. In doing so, we mistake personal accumulation for national progress.
*The real demolition required*
What must be demolished, carefully, like an engineer dismantling an old bridge without collapsing the whole city, is this corrosive mindset. A controlled demolition means unlearning the belief that one is only valuable if richer, cleverer, or more powerful than the next person. It means abandoning the obsession with tribe as the supreme measure of worth.
Only when this inner demolition is complete can we begin to construct a society where a public servant measures success not by his hotel rooms in Kribi, but by jobs created; where a family boasts not about their daughter’s foreign husband, but about her contribution to science or art; where ministers compete, yes, but in building the best schools, the most efficient hospitals, the most innovative industries.
*Breaking free from the village*
Cameroon cannot build a harmonious nation on the foundations of rivalry, envy, and material showmanship.
To pretend otherwise is to decorate a collapsing house with new paint. What we need is not another round of cosmetic prosperity but a deliberate demolition of the parochial mindset that has held us hostage for decades.
Cameroon is too big, too diverse, and too full of promise to remain trapped in the mentality of a single village feud. We must dare to dismantle, with vision and care, the mental scaffolding of “I am worthier than you.” Only then can we construct a truly national identity, one that looks prosperous not just to the eye, but to the soul.