African and the Crisis

Africa and The 2008 Financial Crunch

This question might sound easy, yet it is not, the answer might sound easy while it isn’t. It’s not easy to answer simply because being conscious of a problem is not solving it. The process of problem solving starts with problem identification, and combines multiple actions including brainstorming on the solution and applying the outcomes.

Early in 2008, african leadership (west and central african states), claimed that our economies were going to remain untouched by the crisis, just because our banks are less exposed than westerns’. This was a quick answer to a problem that was going to be posed later. Nowadays, folks out there are very anxious about their jobs. We don’t yet lose many (I guess because we have few), but on a day to day basis we can see how the crisis is affecting our lives and those of people we love.

To list just few:

I know a big Cameroonian coffee exporter who has over 5 000 metric tons of coffee in stock but no buyer, nobody offers a contract, nobody dares look at it, a year later he was running his business with 2 days of stock.

Congo and Cameroon have claimed a monthly loss of over 24 mios USD every month on wood exports

Geovic Ltd was working on a project of iron extraction at Mbalam, East of Cameroon. The production was scheduled to start in 2009, now it is posponed for 2011.

The worse is and for sure, the pressure and the stress that africans in here feel daily in their job site, when requested to cut costs by all means. Some have been requested to park office cars, others have had their mobile phone allocation cut or simply canceled, I even know a company that has started turning down air conditioners in a very hot environment, and not just that, no bonus is paid, no salary increase.

One could spend a night long describing how africans feel the crisis.

Now, what is the way forward?

We are gratefull to the folks at government offices for the humble efforts they have done in recognizing that...