BAMENDA, CAMEROON – Vivian Emade sits at her office desk, its surface piled high with papers. Her left hand supports her chin, and her eyes are lost in thought.
Emade, 40, is a widow with five children who hails from the Southwest region of Cameroon. She is one of the new recruits hired under Operation 25,000 Youths, an initiative launched by President Paul Biya to reduce unemployment in the country by offering jobs in the public service sector to citizens not older than 40.
“I am grateful to the government for absorbing me at the age of 40,” she says.
But despite the president’s promise that employees would start receiving their pay from their first month of work, she says she hasn’t earned a dime since receiving her post in December 2011.
“I have shed a basin full of tears ever since I came here,” she says.
Emade says she also must live away from her children and home in Kumba in the Southwest region because her assignment is at the Northwest Regional Delegation of Women’s Empowerment and the Family in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s Northwest region.
“My children are still there in my husband’s house in Kumba all by themselves, with no one to look after them,” she says. “I am dying slowly in pains.”
She says she presented her husband’s death certificate and other documents to prove to the government that she resides in Kumba, but her Bamenda posting remained. She has been moving back and forth with limited funds in order to take care of her family in Kumba.
“I have a sick child whom I have to look after all the time,” Emade says. “As a result, I travel to Kumba every now and then to follow up [on] his ailing health. I have borrowed over 600,000 francs ($1,145) just to make sure that my children are well taken care of.”
She says her current situation runs counter to the mission of the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and the Family, where her posting is.
“Posting me to the Northwest region instead of the Southwest to me is contrary to what my ministry itself preaches,” Emade says. “If the ministry is really bent on empowering women and family, they should have posted me in my region, where I can easily run my family.”
Emade says she can no longer stand the stress of living away from her children.
“I feel like quitting,” she says. “I used to work in the private sector before the recruitment, and I was earning a small salary that I managed well. Now, the case is different. There is no source of income for me.”
Emade says she wishes that the government would address the situation of the newly recruited 25,000 employees so that they could excel in their new posts. Work without extrinsic motivation – even if intrinsic motivation is there – is ineffective, she says.
“The joy with which I received the news of this employment is gradually fading away,” Emade says.
Recruits of Operation 25,000 Youths cite lack of pay and relocation away from family as obstacles to benefiting from the new government employment program. But government officials and public service representatives say that the recruits are lucky to have jobs and will receive their wages soon. Meanwhile, others say the problems aren’t isolated to the program, with lack of pay common in government jobs and the country struggling to recover from strict economic policies to repay loans.
In a 2011 campaign speech, Biya promised employment to 25,000 youths in the public service sector in a project coined Operation 25,000 Youths. After Biya won re-election, the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms posted lists of all accepted applicants by February 2012, and selected youths started assuming duty between December 2011 and March 2012, depending on the date of their acceptance.
But to date, there has been no salary for the bulk of the new employees. In March 2012, approximately 700 of the 25,000 youths received their first salaries, according to the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reform website. In June and July, two more groups of the newly recruited also received their salaries, bringing the total recruits paid to approximately 3,000. Employees expect the government to announce another payment list by the end of August.
Like Emade, many others employed in the government program say they have received little or no pay working jobs that are far away from their families.
Christophe Merewa, a 40-year-old Muslim man, is a newly recruited information technology specialist working with the University of Bamenda through the government employment program. Merewa says he did not at first believe that the campaign promise to employ 25,000 youths would come to fruition.
“I was very pessimistic about the whole thing,” he says. “I thought it was a presidential campaign strategy used by the president to win youths to his side. My wife is the one who applied for me. Left to me alone, I would not have applied.”
But he says the program has not functioned so smoothly. Merewa, who is from the Far North region, traveled to the University of Bamenda in December 2011 to try to begin his job.
“When I came here in Bamenda in December, I did not meet the appropriate authority to receive me,” he says. “I was told he was not on site. This gave me the opportunity to go back to Far North to continue with my business in order to be able to feed my family.”
Merewa returned to Bamenda in March to assume his new position. But he says he hasn't received any pay to date, making it hard to live.
“I am finding it difficult to live a normal life here in Bamenda,” Merewa says. “I find it difficult paying my rents, eating or even buying something for myself. My family is also suffering because of this.”
Merewa says the hardest part of his current situation is that he misses his wife and four children, who still reside in the Far North region, thousands of kilometers away from Bamenda. But Merewa can't afford to bring them to Bamenda.
“In as much as I like to stay here in Bamenda to learn more English, I also would love my family to stay by my side,” he says. “The government should facilitate the payment of our dues so that families will be reunited.”
Merewa says that if he doesn't receive his salary soon, he will go back to the Far North to look for another means to support his family.
“I will not stay here in Bamenda for seven months without a salary,” he says. “Never.”
But if the government is able to begin paying the new employees, he says the Operation 25,000 Youths could be a wonderful project.
Charity Nebare, 27, received a post at the Divisional Delegation of Social Affairs in Donga-Mantung, one of the divisions farthest northwest in the Northwest region.
Nebare says the present dispensation is working against her and her family.
“I am the firstborn in a family of six, and we are orphans,” she says. “My younger ones depend on me for financial and moral assistance, but now they are far off in Ndian division in the Southwest region, and I am working in Donga-Mantung without a single franc as salary.”
Nebare says the situation is more than she can bear, as she is also battling health problems. Nebare says she welcomed the recruitment with much joy, thinking that it would provide a steady income for her to support her family. But she wasn't anticipating being too far away to look after them.
“I am terribly disturbed because I don’t know how my younger ones are surviving in Mundemba,” she says.
Meryl Mendou’a hails from the Eastern region’s capital of Bertoua. But she was posted to the Divisional Delegation of Women’s Empowerment in Fundong, the capital of the Boyo division in the Northwest region.
Mendou’a says she feels like going back to Bertoua, but she can’t afford it without receiving pay for her work.
“I feel like going to Bertoua to see my family, but only [the cost of] transportation alone is enough to feed me for like a month and over,” she says. “I am completely fed up with my present situation because I have become an open beggar.”
Mendou’a says she is tired of depending on others in this new region.
“The divisional delegate and his family housed me for over three months,” she says. “I cannot thank them enough for that wonderful gesture because I don’t know what I would have done without them.”
Mendou’a says she needs a salary to support her self and to survive the stress.
Paul Nwereh, 35, was born in Bamenda and lived there all his life. He worked as a vehicle loader in one of the bus stations until his new recruitment sent him to the Center region to work at the Ministry of Water Resources and Energy in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon.
But he says he had to come home because of the lack of pay.
“I couldn’t continue to stay in Yaoundé indefinitely without any hope for a salary,” he says. “I have three children and a wife to look after. That is why I came back to Bamenda to work some money for them.”
Nwereh says working in the public service sector brought him nothing but hardship.
“Working in Yaoundé made life so difficult for me,” he says. “I trekked over five kilometers to and from work every day for four months that I stayed there. I lost almost 5 kilograms due to stress and poor feeding conditions.”
Nwereh says that he will return to Yaoundé in a month to resume his post at the ministry now that he has managed to save money for his family. But when this money runs out, he plans to return home once again.
Judy Abong, the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and the Family's delegate to the Northwest region, says that the recruits were lucky to pass through the direct employment system, which is rare in Cameroon.
“Normally, Cameroonians write entrance exams into training schools for them to be integrated into the Cameroon public service,” Abong says. “But in this case, there were no entrance exams. Candidates just deposited applications, and they were selected using some criteria. I think it is amazing.”
Abong says that the ministry tries to ensure that families remain together, but it can’t satisfy everybody. In cases where there are many married couples who live in a particular locality, some must receive assignments in other towns or regions to avoid overstaffing in one delegation.
“During the assumption of duty process in my ministry in Yaoundé, one of the documents asked from the new recruits was their marriage certificates, for those who are married,” Abong says. “This was to make sure that wives are sent to where their husbands are resident and husbands sent to where their wives are resident.”
Abong says that married men or women do receive location preference over widows if one of the two has to stay in a particular delegation given their marriage certificates.
“It wasn’t easy for the ministry, but they did their best,” Abong says.
Boniface Batebe, head of the personnel division at the University of Bamenda, a state-run university, says that citizens should applaud the government for absorbing 25,000 youths into public service.
“The president of Cameroon has treated the Cameroonian youths like a caring father, a father who never deceives or fails his children,” he says. “The fact that he took the decision to employ 25,000 youths means he is committed to fighting unemployment in the nation.”
Batebe says salaries will come when the time is right.
“Recruiting 25,000 youths is a massive project,” he says. “It is going to take time for the public service to treat the files of 25,000 youths. It is going to go step by step so that mistakes are not made.”
Batebe says the president did say that salaries would start from the first month of employment, but this was not possible for reasons beyond the control of the public service managers. Batebe says that Cameroon will pay its newly recruited employees according to the specifications of the Cameroon Labor Code.
But others say that the problems aren’t isolated to the youth employment program and are rather signs of larger issues.
Marie-Claire Tata, a graduate from one of the government teacher training colleges in the Northwest region, says she has been working as a government-contracted teacher for two years without a salary.
“I don’t know why the 25,000 are stressing on their salaries,” Tata says. “They should know that the government of Cameroon only pays its new employees several months after they started work. And when it comes, it comes with arrears.”
Tata says it is even unfair that some 25,000 new employees received their first salaries after four months of work, when some teachers like her have been working for two years without a salary.
“The government is treating some of its workers unjustly,” Tata says. “It started paying some 25,000 newly recruited just a few months after they started work, leaving other workers at the disadvantage.”
Fondo Sikod, an economics professor at the University of Yaoundé I, says the government’s Operation 25,000 Youths is untimely following the Structural Adjustment Program, a strict set of economic policies that countries must implement to receive loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that reduce public spending on health, education and development to focus on debt repayment and economic restructuring.
“Cameroon is just recovering from the Structural Adjustment Program,” Sikod says. “Bloating the economy with 25,000 new workers is leading the economy into a dungeon. I wonder whether the government consulted economists before taking this action.”
But Batebe says Cameroon has weathered the Structural Adjustment Program, and the youth employment program is helping the nation to rebuild.
“When Cameroon committed to the Structural Adjustment Program, a lot of things went wrong,” he says. “Thousands of workers were laid off, salaries were slashed, companies were privatized, unemployment was on the rise and economic crisis was eating deep into the fabrics of the economy. Today, Cameroon has come out of the Structural Adjustment Program successfully, and so they must make up for lost glories. And one of the actions is to increase employment to meet up with the shortage of staff that they suffered as a result.”
