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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
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| Feb 4 2007, 9:22 PM EST (current) | MaMary | 1 photo added |
| Feb 2 2007, 8:45 PM EST | heru-seth | 119 words added, 60 words deleted |
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Background:
Discussion of the Background to the constitution here
The neocolonial, annexor state from whose shadow we are now emerging, is based on a model in which the people serve the state, and the state in turn serves the indigenous ruling class and their neocolonial masters in Paris. Surely, we are going to discard this model completely and must consider others.
The nationalist model is very common in the world, but is it a completely healthy model for us to adopt? In this model, the state is an abstraction that every other institution serves. The people are servants to this abstract state, and things like national pride and prestige are very important. France, US, China, UK, Turkey. These seem to follow the nationalist model, and are in the habit of using force to defend "national interest" and pride.
The mercantilist model. In these countries and city states, commerce and the acquisition of wealth are the main engines. Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong immediately come to mind. These are very organized countries, with good services, educational infrastructure and the like, but these things are all done with the global marketplace in mind. They enjoy, and depend upon, the solidarity and support of powerful allies without whom envious countries would invade them. Weakness has never made any state the target of an invasion: success, wealth, possession of widely useful resources--these attract parasites, rovers, roamers, and bandits who believe they have enough weapons to overwhelm the rich but militarily weak state. Japan, Costa Rica, and many others depend on others for their defense. Merita (Africa--every state there) lacks such a powerful champion. We have only each other today, decades after 'independence'. Hence, what Southern Cameroons becomes is not a matter of choosing models; what Southern Cameroons becomes should be what Merita (Africa) should become: a region secure from potential opportunists. This is NOT an easy task, seeing the little support Southern Cameroonians have given the League so far. If history does not fail us, many such opportunist countries will obstruct our restoration of Southern Cameroons. We all know at least one that was best placed to make our case public, yet it did not. Having said that, there exist financially successful small states with potent militaries (Switzeland), which make it expensive for potential aggressors. This model ought to be studied carefully. The other argument for a mercantilist state is that while desirable to act in concert with the rest of Africa, we cannot afford to wait for Africa as a block to get its act together. Our union with la Republique is an example of the clumsiness of ill-considered lockstep action. A poorly run, chaotic country rich in natural resources always makes a more attractive target for opportunities than a well run country. We should therefore not be shy to innovate.
CLARIFICATION: The ongoing genocide project on Merita/Africa makes Switzerland's weapons totally transparent. Winston Churchill advised his countrymen that wars of the future would be wars of the mind: like distractions today which keep Meritans/Africans unaware that they are being exterminated. Southern Cameroons is regaining independence at a unique moment in Merita: every independent region here is beholden to one European center or another and reports to it. Unlike these, Southern Cameroons was abandoned: Britain, the dead beat colonial dad, cannot make us report to them, as Cameroun reports to France. So we have only our selves to blame if we design an unhappy future for our country. Yes, innovate, but that means upgrade, not invent from scratch. We have too many working parts on the shelves to take the long path of inventing everything, or--worse--imitating the faulty systems which we are fleeing from back to Southern Cameroons.
[Please, explain "Merita", and why it is better than "Africa". OK, See explanation below. BTW, this font in bold is more legible than the default font.]
The welfare state. Scandinavia, Germany. We cannot afford it. In fact, we cannot even consider it: Southern Cameroonians have always been productive people; idleness is shunned throughout our region, and even the appearance of laziness brings shame. Our cultures also make work plentiful and routine: we are all agrarians, after all, and each season brings back its own chores. At any rate, there are more reasons which make a welfare state impossible in the future Southern Cameroons.
ARGUMENT:The socialist state. I do not understand it well. I hope somebody can elaborate a little bit more. My sense is that we should be encouraging free enterprise, while safeguarding the environment, human rights etcetera.
COUNTERARGUMENT:I suggest that we define a socialist state by its best example on our continent, Ujamaa as introduced into Tanzania by Mwalimu Nyerere. In this flavor of socialism, the state makes it its primary work to guarantee the security of each individual citizen. That means security from poverty (called social security in some European countries) and from other threats to physical and emotional stability during your entire lifespan. In return, the individual supports the state.
The affection Mwalimu Nyerere earned from his fellow citizens even after his retirement sets him apart from ALL presidents of other socialist countries everywhere, from China to Cuba. Even today, public dialogue in Tanzania remains far freer than in any other Meritan (African) state. By the way, Ujamaa socialism best resembles what I would recommend for the future Southern Cameroons.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Tanzania remained a poor state and Mwalimu's agenda began to unravel after he departed. It could be argued that Mwalimu's exemplary behavior was a product of a high personal moral tone and not a product of socialism. His socialism was also the product of that personality. We should be looking for a good system that serves the people, but is resilient and predictable. If we are lucky we will always find good leaders. But if we are unlucky to have some bad leaders, it is only a good system that would protect us. So we can reduce the cause of the failure of Ujamaa socialism to this: Nyere's generation failed to transmit its healthy values to posterity. The lesson, then is not to look for luck (there is no luck in this business of founding nations) or for another model, nethod, system but to devise an educational system capable of transimitting the values we recover and restore. That means that the priority, the primary task is to recover (not choose) our historical model AND then design institutions to protect it from enemies within (self-hating Meritans [Africans] or foreigners who hate us).Given our [recent] history as Africans (deprivation, colonialism, annexation), our relatively high level of educated persons, our relatively small size, our natural resources, my bias is towards making us Africa's first true mercantilist state. Mercantilism provides the greatest amount of power and influence for a small country.
NOTE on Merita. Africa comes from two Medu (hieroglyph) words meaning land of burning souls. The historical name by which our ancestors all over the homeland have called our land, and by which they still call it today in select societies throughout our home continent is Merita, another Medu word meaning Our Beloved Land. (Source: http://www.theearthcenter.com/index.php?title=home/merita )
An alternative, and the one we have a duty to consider before any other is a Meritan (African) state. Why? Because a healthy self-knowledge requires that we start from our true history, a history which precedes conquest and colonisation by tens of thousands of years. Any later point for starting our history reduces us to imitators of these other state forms which all have very serious problems, which have created our worst problem: genocide by their core practitioners.
Here's how. The nationalist state, by its nature, caters to its interest at the expense of any other state weaker than itself; therefore, it is opportunist and becomes expansionist as soon as a neighbour state nods asleep over its resources. Current examples abound...
The mercantilist state must first solve the problem of how to survive the hungry nationalist states, and modern mercantile states solve this problem by partnership with the nationalist state. That partnership guarantees the mercantile state protection from the nationalist state. Southern Cameroons can never afford the mercantilist form because, as part of Merita (Africa) it, too, is the target of an ongoing genocidal war.
Our historical state form is a healthy one; it is a time-tested one; it is a durable one. We must not make the mistake of supposing that it lasted over 75, 000 years before it fell to Europeans a mere 2,000 years ago because it had been inhumane, cruel, ineffective, or inefficient. On the contrary. Look at our continent! Not a single slave plantation anywhere, though you will find enslavements here and there. Why? Time gave our systems engineers far more experience (that is maturity) than it gave later commers to the society-building task, so that less wealthy members of our societies never found it necessary to resort to the frequent revolutions you see in France, England, and elsewhere in Europe.
Our historical systems resemble socialism and communism more than they resemble anything else around today. Test this by observing how kingships work in your region. How consultations are carried out. How consensus is discovered and then effected. When our system fails, we know at what level failure occurred: a tyrant (ego), a lower level traitor helping invaders (you see those in Southern Cameroons even today, some at the level of Classical Rulers), natural disasters, and such.
When it succeeded, our system was and has been second to none in providing social security (provisions, housing, aging) or in providing emotional security (uninterrupted, life-long counseling), the very resources Southern Cameroonians in exile confess they lack even in their wealthiest host countries. Out-of-Africa is a frequent label today, even today. Our system has been copied and recopied and modified and remodified, often clumsily, by conquering imitators. When a powerful western ruler visited Merita during his administration, his wife brought back out-of-Africa our common expression 'It takes a village to raise a child', but you will see, if you live far abroad, that admiring/envying Westerners have not yet figured how to copy that village system which throughout Merita has raised healthy children who do not develop the disfunctions those who quote our child-rearing system hope to learn (of course without crediting us).
The future Southern Cameroon will be wise to stop imitating our imitators, that is, those systems that conquered our systems . Instead, Southern Cameroons should re-group and focus on upgrading, improving, modernising our own system. Only then can we show other systems what we too have been offering long before they copied it. It is self disrespect to copy a foreign model when that model is itself an inferior copy of your very own original. Inferior? Because it is failing as we write in these areas: crime (and spreading it to us), despair (children abandoning their parents in nursing homes, which some call house death row), in basic despair (as defining oneself by one's material possessions leaves most with an empty feeling as they age), in child-abandonment (into day care centers because of social insecurity), in generation gaps (as the natural processes of maturing and aging baffle citizens), in loneliness (the condition of being physically among people but not feeling a connection to them in any lasting way), in medicine (where improvisers pose as experts in front of diseases they do not know how to cure), in resource distribution (where capitalism counts itself a success at over 3 per cent unemployed humans!!), in suicides among soldiers (who discover too late why they are being put in harm's way), and in more other areas that every human needs to accept his or her life as a meaningful experience.
The counter consideration is to ponder why the traditional African state succumbed to Arab and European expansionism. They must have had a weakness or many weaknesses that rendered them susceptible. We should not therefore dismiss other models, but must put everything on the table in order to come up with something that sustains our values, yet does not collapse so easily under aggression.
That is why the notion of upgrading is present in every system. A total switch always exposes the switcher. Capitalism can be humanized: that would be ugpgrading it. Our Kemetic/Meritan system can be trained in self-defense: that would be upgrading it, by balancing concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the invidual and the physical security of that individual's Southern Cameroons. Merita was not conquered by any beautiful thing its invaders brought but by that invader's power and cruelty, a cruelty recorded as beyond our understanding, then or today. The processes of those conquests (first European, then Arab, and then European again) are on record as violent. Where, for example, is Carthage (now Tunisia)? An excellent example of genocide. In their records, the Romans called it Carthaginia, and when they conquered it, they spared not even the domesticated animals! Children, women, boys, girls, babies, adults. That was the cost of defeat. They slaughtered every Meritan there and wrote with pride about in their histories. Tales of these horrors to which our several ancestors succumbed are audible throughout Merita even today.
The counter consideration is to ponder why the traditional African state succumbed to Arab and European expansionism. They must have had a weakness or many weaknesses that rendered them susceptible. We should not therefore dismiss other models, but must put everything on the table in order to come up with something that sustains our values, yet does not collapse so easily under aggression.
That is why the notion of upgrading is present in every system. A total switch always exposes the switcher. Capitalism can be humanized: that would be ugpgrading it. Our Kemetic/Meritan system can be trained in self-defense: that would be upgrading it, by balancing concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the invidual and the physical security of that individual's Southern Cameroons. Merita was not conquered by any beautiful thing its invaders brought but by that invader's power and cruelty, a cruelty recorded as beyond our understanding, then or today. The processes of those conquests (first European, then Arab, and then European again) are on record as violent. Where, for example, is Carthage (now Tunisia)? An excellent example of genocide. In their records, the Romans called it Carthaginia, and when they conquered it, they spared not even the domesticated animals! Children, women, boys, girls, babies, adults. That was the cost of defeat. They slaughtered every Meritan there and wrote with pride about in their histories. Tales of these horrors to which our several ancestors succumbed are audible throughout Merita even today.
