The Minister of Youth Affairs and Civic Education, Mounouna Foutsou, shamed the Tiko municipality for projecting a dirty building. This was during a working visit to the South West Region.
The Multipurpose Youth Empowerment Centre had been constructed in the municipality, and the minister came to inaugurate it.
When Mounouna Foutsou went there, he noticed that the painting of the newly constructed building had fallen off. It was looking dirty and unkempt.
What was meant to be an inauguration ceremony was turned into a sensitisation cleanup campaign.
This was a huge embarrassment to the mayor of Tiko Municipality, who spearheaded the project.
“The decision was an act of moral, civic, and entrepreneurial rearmament of the population and those who were assembled there,” the minister said over Cameroon, explaining why he passed and went to Idenau without inaugurating the building in Tiko.
“I decided to transform the inaugural ceremony into a sensitisation one because I was not satisfied. I was not satisfied with the fact that they brought me to inaugurate a building that was not clean,” he said.
The minister said cleaning the building was not something complicated. To him, it just needed a will or volunteering.
Lesson on Civic Responsibility
Instead of inaugurating something that was not complicated, he mobilised the young people who were there to do the work.
“It was not normal. Civic-mindedness needs to be carried out by each of us.”
To the Youth Affairs minister, the money used in organising the occasion could have been used to finance the painting and cleaning of the building.
After mobilising the youths to do it at a cost of less than 500,000 FCFA, the minister, after his engagements in the regions, then inaugurated the building.
These multipurpose youth empowerment centres, he says, are also the clinics of his ministry.
Aside from the inaugural ceremony in Tiko, he also visited the centre for Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) in Misselele, still in Tiko Subdivision.
There, he provided equipment to the youth inmates to empower them in agriculture and other income-generating activities.
