We must call out the corruption that thrives at Nsimalen International Airport

By Hans Ngala

Being a journalist in Cameroon can be a big risk as the deaths of Martinez Zogo and Ola Bebe earlier this year – proved. However, there are times when this might just work to your advantage too.

A few weeks ago, I arrived Yaounde via the Nsimalen International Airport and as usual, when I hand my passport to the immigration police, I usually hold my breath, waiting to see if maybe they will ask me to follow them – usually a sign that you could be under some government watchlist for some kind of “concerning” news report, but no this was not the case.

I was handed my passport and left. When I came back for my return flight some days later, I was confronted with the utter corruption of some of our fellow Cameroonians at the airport.
It usually starts outside, at the airport parking lot. There are some self-appointed agents who insist on weighing your bags or wrapping them, then there are those other uniformed porters who insist on bringing a trolley to push your luggage. I am not sure whether I hate their guts or the fact that they feel entitled to some kind of pay for offering unsolicited services!

I have been to several airports in other countries and have never been treated the way I get treated in my own country by own fellow countrymen.

So at Nsimalen, the self-appointed luggage agents detained me for over 40 minutes, claiming that my bags were over the weight limit of 23kgs and that as a result, I had to pay. But then I explained that I have to go inside the airport and have my bags weighed and they will tell me in there what I have to do exactly.

The guys detained me and I had to check in but then the agent inside responsible for issuing boarding passes – decided to stop boarding 20 minutes before the time and when I got there, he gruffly told me I was late. Then of course, asked me how much I was going to give him. I found myself in an awkward position. As a journalist, I am bound by professional ethics not to give or receive bribes since my job is essentially to expose this sort of thing.
However, with a flight ticket worth F CFA 400,000 in jeopardy with every minute I wasted, I had no choice but to give him a bribe. With no money on me, I had to phone a friend to send me a Mobile Money transfer to my MTN account and I transferred it to him for him to board me on a flight I had every right to be on and I had been to the airport on time.

What struck me was the fact that this guy named Paul when he took my passport and saw my profession written as ‘journalist’ started begging me not to taint him. He apparently knew that what he was doing was wrong and he didn’t want to get caught. If this could happen to me a mere student journalist, what was happening to other Cameroonians?

It reminded me of the experiences of my good friend Nsaibirni Warren Lee. Warren is also a student and an entrepreneur who employs six other young Cameroonians to run a cleaning business. He was at the Ministry of Finance recently and parked his car properly only to come out a few minutes later and find that his car had been the only car in a row of cars to be towed. Apparently, one of the local council people had noticed that he was a young man whom they could take advantage of. Like in my case, Warren asked what he had done wrong but they simply asked him to pay up or have his car towed.
“I was faced with a grave injustice” he told me on Whatsapp “Imagine being in the city center with no money on you and having your car towed,” he lamented.

These sort of get-rich schemes by officials who are meant to serve ordinary, law-abiding Cameroonians but who then turn around to exploit and steal, must be condemned in the strongest terms possible. I just did so with this article. Do same in your own space.