By Sam Nuvala Fonkem
The plethora of cabinets formed by President Paul Biya ever since he came to office in 1982 have invariably been tagged as technocratic in order to distinguish them from those of his predecessor, Amadou Ahidjo, whose governmental team mates were usually composed of politicians and administrators.
How technocratic Mr. Biya's endless string of governments have been and what goods they have been able to deliver is quite a different matter altogether. What remains indisputable is the fact that his governments have had a significant dosage, perhaps an overdose, of members of the intelligentsia including economists, sociologists, jurists, engineers, medical scientists and what have you.
It was believed during the early years of his regime that his apparent fondness for modernism as opposed to Ahidjo's traditionalist style of governance was going to enable Cameroon to leapfrog into the 21st century and become a pacesetter in political and socio-economic advancement.
Cameroonians were sold dreams of a country linked by magnificent bridges and glittering super highways, a country where every rural community and urban neighbourhood would be provided with a health centre and a general practitioner; a country where a universal primary educational system equipped with decent classrooms filled with beaming pupils and enthusiastic teachers; a country where people go to bed with the certainty of waking up to a healthy breakfast and three square meals; where people can go to sleep without keeping one eye open for fear of night marauders.
It would be quite simplistic to conclude that the failure of the regime to concretise these dreams after a quarter century of leadership has been entirely the fault of the intelligentsia or the collective responsibility of the educated class. The problem lies in the fact that when members of the educated class accede to leadership, they tend to discard their toga of scientific knowledge and prefer to don the mask of sycophancy.
So, instead of using their expert knowledge to move forward the country to prosperity, the majority of these technocrats have preferred to play the role of court jesters in order to grab a chunk of the national cake. And would you blame the man on the street who expresses scorn for intellectuals in government?
The label of technocracy might have been a misnomer after all. A good number of these so-called technocrats, especially in the early years of his regime, were Mr. Biya's schoolmates who were selected on the basis of cronyism. It is well over a decade since Mr. Biya's propagandists have ceased extolling the virtues of this pseudo-technocracy.
There has, in recent years, been a remarkable shift in semantics from technocracy to technology and the latest moonshine he has embarked on selling the youths is a virtual universe called technopoly.
Addressing the nation on the occasion of the National Youth Day last week, Mr. Biya, who was visibly less buoyant and triumphant than usual (probably because of the Lion's inability to bring home the Cup of African Nations), sounded so unconvincing as he struggled to paint a bright future for the youths. The portrait of paradise was peopled, not by angels and cherubims, but by faun-like images he conjured with his frequent references to a world of uncertainties, a future of uncertainties and other uncertainties.
Mr. Biya has dubbed his proposed technopoly a University Free Zone that would train technologists and high-level technicians to supply specialised manpower to business enterprises. At face value, one would get the impression that he was promising a new project to resolve the country's chronic unemployment problem.
Far from it. The technopoly project is in effect a variation of the information and communication technology, ITC, programme he has been singing ever since the Internet invaded our cultural space.
Having run out of fresh ideas and having failed to deliver on previous promises of economic salvation, Mr. Biya and his spin doctors are merely churning and recycling stale stew to serve very disappointed but highly expectant youths who rightly suspect somehow that the government is taking them for a ride.
In reality, the University Free Zone is just another name for the computerised distant learning centres, which the six State universities are supposed to have been putting in place for the past several years. Distant learning itself is not a new educational system.
It used to be done by postal correspondence before the invention of its electronically mediated counterpart. Call it electronic distant learning, technological learning or academic free zone, it is all a matter of semantics. All we know for now is that the proposed virtual university or University Free Zone would be located in Yaounde as its technopolis.
So, we can joyfully look forward to a capital city which has steadily moved from a village to a township, to a metropolis and finally to a technopolis endowed with a luxurious cyberspace with bright superhighways, toll-gates and checkpoints manned by polite scientists dressed in white overalls and bow ties, not some rude bunch of hostile forces of law and order.
The prospects of digital advancement are very enticing, until we bother to examine what behavioural scientists and media researchers have observed about it. Social scientists have posited that digital technology promotes social stratification and widens the gap between the rich and the poor and the knowledge gap by providing equal and affordable access to the technology, we would still perpetuate social inequalities.
Various schools of thought have observed that computer literacy training is really fulfilling a hidden curriculum that imposes the values of a dominant culture by teaching people, especially marginalised groups to obey commands and accept repetitive tasks. It teaches students to accept the authority of those who define computer applications and provide user assistance.
Thus, according to this argument, well-intentioned efforts to promote computer literacy for marginalised groups, the have-nots, really conditions them to accept their place in a system of economic exploitation (Roszack, 1994).
Likewise, wishful thinking about improving society through the Internet may be propaganda by a "virtual class" of business people and bureaucrats who control the Internet and seek to exploit it for their own mercenary ends. (Kroker and Weinstein, 1994)
We would always be on our guard every time we hear a high-tech company such as Apple or Microsoft has donated computers to a school, college or university. The recipients are happy to get the computers as they see them as a key to the future while the high-tech company gets tax rebates and favourable public relations, the taxpayers save money and everyone is apparently a winner.
French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, (1990) has argued that the pursuit of technological improvement led to the social dominance of an elite of scientists, engineers and managers - a technopoly - for whom technology became an end in itself, devoid of moral foundation. For Ellul, technology is a bluff and the efforts of technologists were ultimately ineffective. Technologists promise a great deal to assure their status in a society conditioned to welcome technological progress, but they deliver very little.
The question as to how the would-be graduates of the proposed Free Zone would be absorbed in the economic sector is still moot. Ever since we began marking time to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank by closing down dozens of State-owned enterprises such as the tanning and beef canning, paper pulp, bagging and agricultural tools factories, and now that we are left with a very weak industrial production sector, one wonders if we are not training people to swell the ranks of economic refugees in the Diaspora.
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