The Intrigues of Privatisation and the Stalemate at CAMAIR

By Nfamewih Aseh*

The law of neo-liberalism states that “government is a bad manager”; that business men and women were more transparent and accountable and were thus better able to manage corporate business within the framework of the private corporate sector than the state; that this business men and women should either be white or have a white backing. Most importantly, that the white control of the corporate private sector is the foundation for “good governance”, hence the need for privatisation.

Neo-liberalism by definition would refer to that period in Africa, in the late 1980s, when the white man countries returned to reclaim the economy, towards the end of the cold war, and after the end of the independent struggles of the 1940s and 1950s. And one way of achieving that goal was by making sure that the structure of the state “adjusted” to accommodate the private corporate capital; by taking away the corporate sector from the state and handing it over to the private business men and women, in this case whites whose economic activities would bring about “good governance”. It thus became imperative for the United Nations to commission its specialised organs such as the World Bank and the IMF to come up with a strategy of achieving that goal.

They did and that strategy was embodied in the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) which had privatisation and liberalisation as main items on the grand agenda and targeted thirty seven African countries including Cameroon. Like any other agenda
that is set by the West destined for Africa, the announcement for the coming of SAP in June 1987 raised the hopes of Cameroonians who believed in the daydream of private business coming to rescue Cameroon’s economy from the state, the “bad manager”, and bring
to about “good governance”.

All the noise about liberalisation, democratisation, and privatisation as antidotes for an economy in crisis; as pre-conditions for “good governance”, turned out to be a doom, an eyewash, a cover-up; a butterfly chase that kept Cameroonians dreaming of a
pie in the sky. Even the political liberalisation only successfully liberalised the political sphere achieving only the creation of “opposition” political parties whose duty has only been to check the
mismanagement antics of the state, also turned out to be hogwash. Before long, even the “Good Governance” singsong went into a tail spin while the white man, acting through local allies, were all over the place buying up everything under SAP with the state told to
hands off the provision of social services.

In Zimbabwe, the imposition of ESAP (Economic Structural Adjustment Programme) in 1989 by the very Bretton Woods twins (World Bank/IMF), being the Zimbabwean version of SAP, brought back the descendants of the Rhodesian rump capital from
Johannesburg with a mission to wrest power from the state on behalf of Britain and the USA. It also selected from among the urban “jobless” elite Morgan Tsvangirai to, in collaboration with the white
business class, fight Mugabe on the ticket of Britain and the USA whose political agenda was to wring power from Mugabe and reclaim the economy of Zimbabwe and overrun the entire Southern African sub-region. Unlike the case of Zimbabwe which is a revolutionary state under a nationalist president, the state in Cameroon is rather a contrivance for political cover-up for economic crimes under a collaborating stratum over which is a President.

The role of this collaborating stratum is to prove as much as possible that, truly, the state is a “bad manager” to ensure the successful implementation of SAP; to ensure that SAP reaches its “completion point”. In that case, both the numerous opposition
political parties that sprouted in Cameroon in the 1990s following the wind of liberalisation that was blowing from the East, the state bureaucrats and managers of state corporations were struggling to
achieve the same goal: to prove as much as possible that the neo-colonial state is a “bad manager”. While the hardcore opposition political parties were busy counting the failures of the state, state bureaucrats and managers of state para-statals, for their part,
were busy “mismanaging” state affairs, all of which brought ample evidence against the state as a “bad manager” and validated the neo-liberal law of which corruption and embezzlement can be understood in that light.

For example, before CamPost was sold to a Canadian firm, Tescult International Ltd, on February 26, 2007, over FCFA 50 billion of Cameroonian’s savings were deliberately stolen from that corporation which was then used as good reason to sell it to a white man’s corporation on the grounds that the black man cannot manage a corporation; that “the neo-colonial state is a bad manager”, which is actually what prompted the IMF/World Bank joint delegation to Cameroon in September 2007, whose intention was to hasten up the privatisation process; to quickly reclaim the economic
sector from a “bad manager”. And almost all the para-statals that have been privatised in Cameroon have gone through this experience.

The case of the Cameroon Electricity Corporation (SONEL) offers another perspective of understanding the neo-liberal law in which “government is a bad manager”. After the sale of that corporation to a USA company, AES-SIROCO, in 2002, the country was immediately plunged into fits of incessant darkness with the idea being to prove that the Americans had inherited a corporation in a very bad state from a “bad manager” and so was putting in “expert” knowledge to revive it. That was also a public relation stunt
for AES-SONEL, which was intended to win the confidence of the Cameroonian public into believing that the Americans were bringing magical solutions to Cameroon’s electricity problems; to do what the “bad manager” could not do. The case of Cameroon Airlines,
which also shows how government officials deliberately swindle funds from state para-statals to justify the idea that “government is a bad manager” so as to justify the sales of such outfits to white man companies, is another case in point.

Although the headaches of the Cameroon Airline company, as a purely indigenous airline company, created by former President Ahmadou Ahidjo who jolted out of the French controlled Air Afrique and created CAMAIR on July 26, 1971 with government owning over 96 % shares in it and which made its inaugural flight on
November 1, 1971 from Douala to Yaoundé, was initially that of victimisation by the French civil aviation authority, which on September 16, 2005 on all CAMAIR flights to France for an indefinite period on grounds that the company did not meet several international as well as transportation norms, leading to serious
revenue losses for the airline company whose activities were finally grounded in March 2008, there was also the problem of negligence on the part of government appointees in the management of the affairs of CAMAIR whose intention was to validate the
neo-liberal law that “government is a bad manager”.

Between 2001 and 2006, the state of Cameroon spent over FCFA 200 billion, in the form of subvention, on CAMAIR but before the end of 2006 CAMAIR was in deep crisis, unable to pay its workers. Even the 433 workers that were retrenched could not be paid their dues, leading to protestations and sit in strikes by
the ex-workers. Before the Belgian consortium was called in to resurrect CAMAIR, the sum of about FCFA 8 billion, being the salary of the 433 ex-workers of CAMAIR, disbursed for payment by the then Minister of Economy and Finance, Polycarpe Abah Abah, by
Ministerial Decision N0 1/D/MINEFI/DGB/PC/BR of October 17, 2006, paid into the CAMAIR account number 2015421-R at CBC Bank Douala, could not be found one year afterwards and the 433 protesting ex-workers had not yet received their pay. Yet accounts showed that they have actually been paid.

Yet still, CAMAIR, in the course of 2006 and 2007, realised FCFA 52 billion plus state subvention of about FCFA 65 billion, making a total of FCFA 117 billion in two years, but was still unable to pay
workers’ salaries. Compounded by the ban by the French civil aviation authority, the crisis of CAMAIR deepened and in conformity with the neo-liberal law in which white man companies are expert managers, SN Airholding, the parent company of SN Brussels
Airlines, was called in to restart CAMAIR to no avail, leading to its grounding in March 2008. Unfortunately for CAMAIR, government being a “bad manager” could not manage it and as an indigenous company, created and run by a “bad manager”, it was not worthy to be bought by a white man company, which could explain why the
attempt to privatise CAMAIR resulted in a stalemate.

Besides, the entire privatisation process, including that of CAMAIR, has remained a shady (“black market”) deal between the state and foreign companies whose only mission is to take total control of all the strategic economic sectors of Cameroon while the
state, the “bad manager”, should content itself with the “fight against poverty”. And that has been the intrigues of the white man against Africans, against Black people, for the last 500 years, since July 1472 in the case of Cameroon. And the fault is with us that, for all these years, we have not yet realised the wickedness of the white man against us; we still see the white man, who operates through proxies, as God.