Jean-Paul Nana Sandjo, the General Manager of Cameroon Airlines Corporation, Camair-Co, says most workers posing as Anglophones in the State owned corporation, are not from the Northwest and Southwest Regions.
He went on to say some incompetent and unscrupulous individuals may have forged Anglophone certificates to gain employment in Camair-Co. This came to the notice of the public after widespread reports tarnished the image of Anglophone employees at Camair-Co as being unqualified and incompetent.
Sandjo was reacting to a comment made by his predecessor, Frederick Mbotto, in 2013 that the files of many Anglophones in the company were without copies of their certificates. Mbotto’s comment that Anglophones were not genuinely qualified, or had used ‘Kumba-made certificates’ to gain employment went viral on the media, when a correspondence written by the Board Chair of Camair-Co, Edouard Akame Mfoumou, to President Paul Biya, on April 6, 2015, on the situation of Camair-Co, leaked.
Defending the reason for the continuous recruitment of personnel by Camair-Co, despite the difficult financial situation of the company, the Board Chairman alleged that many of the workers who were recruited at the start of the company, especially Anglophones were incompetent.
However, Nana Sandjo, an aviation expert, said that what created problems for Camair-Co at the start was inexperience not incompetence.
“I don’t think there was a problem of workers without certificates at Camair-Co, rather, the problem was inexperience. You don’t recruit inexperienced personnel to launch an airline,” Sandjo stressed. According to him, lack of experience by most workers seriously affected work in the company.
Sandjo continued that since Alex Van Elk and his management team that launched the airline were predominantly English speaking, they recruited more English speaking Cameroonians “and since many Francophone parents in Cameroon today send their children to English schools, it was wrong to assume that all the English speaking Cameroonians who were recruited at Camair-Co were bonafide Anglophone because there are some English speaking personnel at Camair-Co who hail from the West Region, should they be termed Anglophones.”
BaretaNews noted that this situation at Camiar-Co only goes to highlight the identity problems of Anglophones in the Cameroons. This platform had earlier defined Anglophones in Cameroon as people with ancestral roots from NW or SW regions and not necessarily those who speak English. Many Francophones today are English Speaking Cameroonians but not Anglophones. If we do not sort out the true meaning of Anglophones in the Cameroons, Cameroonians from Anglophone Cameroon (Anglophones) will continue being cheated upon.
God is still saying something.
