Abstract

Youths have been at the forefront of violent political and anti-establishment contestations throughout Cameroon’s checkered political history. The present study was conducted to assess the interactions between youth off-farm social activities and pastimes, deviant behaviors, attitudes towards violence and the implication for radicalization prevention in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities. Specifically, the study (a) assessed the types and prevalence of youth off-farm social activities and pastimes, (b) assessed youth deviant behaviors and attitudes towards violence and (c) the correlation between youth off-farm social activities and deviant behaviors and attitudes towards violence. The study adopted a cross-sectional descriptive survey design.

Data was collected primarily through a questionnaire survey of 674 systematically selected respondents from 14 Enumeration Areas (EAs) in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities. The data were subjected to exploratory, descriptive, inferential and principal component reduction analyses using SPSS 22.

The study found out that sports (42.3%), watching TV (41.1%), hanging out in snacks, bars and pubs (38.4%), gambling (38.4%), internet and social media usage (25.9%), listening to music (18.9%) and watching movies (18.9%) were the most dominant off-farm social activities and pastimes among youths.

The study also found out that alcohol consumption (68.7%), premarital sex (64.5%), viewing of pornographic content (61.5%), smoking (46.1%), hard drug use (37.8%), truancy (37.8%) and gambling (36.2%) were the most prevalent deviant behaviors among youths. Generally, youths displayed a negative attitude towards violence, with high pro-violence culture score (Mean score=3.9; SD=0.516), low score for remorse for violent crimes (Mean Score=1.84; SD=0.458) and low scores for value for life (Mean score=2.05; SD=0.124).

Finally, the study found out that youths who hang out in bars, pubs or snacks in their pastimes were more prone to engage in deviant acts such as hard drug use (r=0.6), arm robbery (r=0.6), alcohol consumption (r=0.9), smoking (r=0.8), prostitution (r=0.8), scamming (r=0.6), fighting (0.6) and gambling (r=0.8) while those whose pastimes were devoted to watching TV or playing video games were found to be more likely to be involved in fights (r=0.6).

The study concluded that youth pastimes activities makes them susceptible for indulging in deviant acts and developing violent attitudes which makes them prone for radicalization. On the bases of the foregoing the study proposes a theory of change and recommendation for the prevention of youth radicalization in those areas

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

The world’s youth population is at an all-time high (The Commonwealth, 2016). Estimated at

1.8 billion in 2017, young people constitute about 35 percent of the world’s population (World Bank, 2017; Population Reference Bureau, 2018). Globally and particularly in the developing world, the age distribution of the population of most countries show a huge bulge among people between the ages of 15 and 35 years (Population Reference Bureau, 2018). However, nowhere is this demographic boom or youth bulge more acute than in Africa (Sangafowa, 2018).

It is estimated that 70 percent of Africa’s population is under 30 years of age and continues to grow very rapidly at around 2.5% per year (Sangafowa, 2018). Projections show that by the turn of the century, Africa will be home to 40 percent of the world’s population or 4.4 billion people and 41% of the world’s youth will be Africans within three generations (Mo Ibrahim, 2016). By 2030, Africa’s labor force constituting mostly of young people will be larger than China’s and by 2035 it will be larger than India’s (Mo Ibrahim, 2016).

Ordinarily, this demographic bulge should yield a “demographic dividend” given that these young people are full of creativity, enthusiasm, verve and dynamism which if properly harnessed will contribute towards wider economic growth and well-being. This is even more so because, contrary to their fathers, this cohort are more likely to be educated, more ambitious, more exposed to new communication and information technologies and more connected to the world and global opportunities.

But unfortunately, this burgeoning youth and adolescent population in most countries in the African continent is increasingly becoming more of a liability than a blessing (Ananpansah, 2017). For the most part, the majority of African youths are unemployed and constitute the majority of the underemployed and those working in the informal sector even though they are relatively more educated than their parents (International Labor Organization [ILO], 2017).

It has been estimated that out of about 250,000 young people entering the labor market annually in Africa, only 2% (50,000) get employed in the formal sector (International Labor Organization, 2017). Moreover, young people in Africa constitute more than half of the working poor i.e. those who are employed but live below the poverty line (Ahaibwe et al, 2013).

There are indications that the rate of youth’s unemployment, under employment and proportion of this cohort among the working poor will rise significantly in the future (International Labor Organization, 2017). As such, this demographic has become a burden on most family and economy of most African countries given that this strata of the population is feeding on what a very small but aged demographic in the pyramid produces and government social spending to cater for this largely unemployed population is constantly increasing (The Nation, 2014).

In most developed and middle income countries, agriculture has been shown to be a major source of decent youth employment (Afande et al, 2015). Despite the fact that Africa holds half of the world’s uncultivated arable land and the economy of most African states is purely agrarian, the sector has woefully failed to absorb the burgeoning unemployed youth population in most of these countries (Ahaibwe et al, 2013).

Country-wide evidence reveal that youth engagement in agriculture in Africa is declining (Afande et al., 2015). It has been argued that across the African continent, the rudimentary hoe and machete farming dominantly practiced holds no appeal to young people who for the most part view agriculture as a dirty job reserved essentially for the poor and the aged.

Though agriculture constitute the life blood of the rural economy, paradoxically 53% of youth in rural communities are not into agriculture, but rather engaged for the most part in other off-farm socio-economic activities and pastimes (The Nation, 2014). Furthermore, one will expect that the steady growth in the service and industrial sector in most African countries witnessed over the last three decades will help solve the employment conundrum at the urban level.

Unfortunately, these sectors have been unable to meet the employment need of the ever burgeoning urban youth population feeding voraciously from huge rural exodus (Ahaibwe et al., 2013). Excluded from secure salaried work, most young people in the global south and Africa in particular are unable to obtain the social goods, such as a secure white-collar job, that connote “development”, are incapable of moving into gendered age-based categories, especially male adulthood, and they come to be labeled or to label themselves “drop outs,” “failures,” or people “on the shelf” and cannot conform to dominant visions of success (Craig, 2010).

Even though all African countries have ratified the African Youth Charter, very few governments have successfully translated this continental-wide framework for youth development into tangible projects for the greater empowerment of this cohorts at the community level and unfortunately more so in the rural areas (Ananpansah, 2017).

As such most youths in the continent are witnessing unequal access to health, education, financial services and lack political influence at the local, regional and national levels (Paugam, 2004 as cited in Craig, 2010; The Commonwealth, 2016).

In this context of social exclusion and isolation, or what some have called “social disqualification”, most young people across most African countries are feeling a sense of helplessness, inertia, limbo, frustration and anger amidst unmet aspirations (The Commonwealth, 2016).

In their wait hood and in the absence of government policy for their insertion in mainstream society, a greater number of urban youths located at the periphery of the labor market and full time education and those in the rural areas not appealed by subsistence agriculture and its rudimentary practices, as a symbolic form of protest and with their surplus spare time, have inexorably spiraled into anti-social, unproductive, deviant and unorthodox off- farm and socio-economic activities, pastimes, leisure and inactivity (Damstrup, 1987).

Katz (2004) account of unemployed Sudanese youths “marooned by pastimes” and Mains’s (2007) research of unemployed young Ethiopia who report that the only change they experience in their lives is watching the shadows creep from one side of the road to the other with the passing of the sun, typify the experiences of most African youths.

Furthermore, in invariably all African countries, there is the emergence of practices, behaviors, perceptions and the reification of a culture among unemployed youths in poor and working class families that is essentially contestational, anti-social and anti-establishment (Craig, 2010).

In retaliation, government in most African countries, conscious of the political potency of this struggling mass with ruptured futures, have crafted repressive policies which unfortunately have further exacerbated youths exclusion and isolation and created a vicious cycle that have entrapped most of these young people in abject poverty, helplessness, anger and frustration (The Commonwealth, 2010).

This prevalent youth alienation from mainstream society and a growing sense of helplessness, anger and frustration holds rather negative ramifications for the stability of most states in Africa. Evidence from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and Kenya have established a highly positive correlation between radicalization and support for violent extremism and unemployment related –alienation among young people (Dunne, 2015; Omulo, 2017). It is no wonder therefore that youth unemployment-related alienation frequently creep into discussions of radicalization, as young people with no prospects are easily lured by promises of work and status by terrorist organizations or non-state armed actors.

Compounding the problem is the fact that radicalization and sympathy with jihadi movements is even higher among the most educated with disappointed expectations of economic and social advancement but stuck in a prolonged period of “wait hood” (Dunne, 2015).

With increase in communication and information technology and the ubiquity of social media, new digital outlets for radicalization propaganda and channels for recruitment into terrorist networks are emerging and targeting particularly this largely unemployed, disenfranchised and disillusioned youths.

It is no gainsaying therefore that without action to promote young people’s empowerment, employment opportunities and opening up spaces for political participation and influence, most African countries will be squandering their most precious resource. Rather than turning the continent’s youth bulge into a demographic dividend, they will inadvertently transform it into a security liability (The Commonwealth, 2016).

In Cameroon, young people between the ages of 15 and 35 years is estimated at 7.63 million persons, representing 42% of the total population (Bureau Central des Recensements et des Etudes de Population [BUCREP], 2017). In Cameroon, youth unemployment rate is estimated at 8.8%, (ILO, 2017).

However, this seemingly encouraging statistics mask the fact that youths in Cameroon are primarily involved in risky and underpaid employment and constitute the bulk of those involved in the informal sector.

This growing unemployment, coupled with a quasi- nonexistent youth policy, has contributed in alienated young people from Cameroon’s mainstream and gerontocracy and constituted them into a potential and willing pool for recruits for terrorist networks and militias operating within and around the country. This does not augur well for the political stability of the country, which is already suffering from Boko Haram incursions in the northern regions, armed militia activities in the east region and a fledgling rebellion in the Anglophone regions that has blossomed into a humanitarian crisis (International Crises Group [ICG], 2017).

Interested to note is the fact that, this alienated and disenfranchised young people are already constituting the bulk of the operatives of this fratricidal movements (ICG, 2017). If remedial measures are not taken, the country’s young people, in their effort to negotiate a society that systematically constrains them to the periphery of the labor market and mainstream society, will become its greater security liability.

The growing salience of youth’s involvement in political protest and non-state armed group in Africa, has forged a renewed interest in contemporary youth leisure and pastime activities and their potential for influencing deviant behaviors and attitudes towards violence (Craig, 2010). In Cameroon like other African countries confronted with the upsurge of terrorism and armed contestations, there is an ongoing debate to establish the potency and a causal link between young people’s off-farm socio activities and pastimes, deviancy, attitude towards violence and youth radicalization particularly in migrant communities where there is growing level of youth unemployment (ICG, 2017).

The Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities in the littoral region of Cameroon, are primarily cosmopolitan communities dominated by non-indigenes from the various ethnic groups in Cameroon and foreign nationals. In its hay days, Mbanga served as a coffee production and trading hub, attracting large numbers of unemployed youths particularly from the Bamilike regions of the country.

Consequently, when the coffee market plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s, there was widespread unemployment among this strata (Mayor of Mbanga, July 2017. Personal interview, 2018). With very few livelihood alternatives in the agriculture sector, youths have indulged in other off-farm socio-economic activities and pastimes.

Similarly, as the second largest administrative area of the economic capital, Douala IV municipality is host to a substantial number of industries and service providers. However, these have proven inadequate in meeting the employment need of an ever burgeoning youth population. In their “wait hood” to secure remunerative work, this young people are involved in certain leisure activities and pastimes.

This study was carried out as an attempt to contribute to the debate on youth radicalization by empirically profiling youth’s off-farm social activities and the consequences or implication that they augur or hold for youth deviancy and attitudes towards violence.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

During the last twenty-five years the literature on youth in Cameroon and Africa as a whole has been on the rise. Early paradigms labeled Africa’s youth as a “lost generation”, who frequently resorted to violence, looting and rioting to achieve their goals (Amin, 2013).

It is an unquestionable fact that youths in the Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities more than most of their counterparts in other municipalities in the country have been at the forefront of violent political and anti-establishment contestations throughout Cameroon’s checkered political history. This can be eloquently attested by evidence from the maquissard movement in the 1960s, the political contestations and civil disobedience episodes following the advert of political pluralism in the 1990s and during the hunger strikes in 2008 (Ngnemzue, 2009). All of these events were marked by regrettable loss of lives, property and source of livelihood in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities and polarization among the country’s myriad ethnic, religious, political and linguistic groups. (Mbaku, 2012; Tembeng, 2014).

As successive cohorts of youths come of age in these municipalities, will this long-standing tradition of violent political contestation and anti-establishment proclivities be perpetuated and how can youths be prevented from embracing these tendencies? Drawing from Craig (2010) and Funk et al (1999), this study contended that precise answers to this salient interrogation and policy or programmatic propositions can only be advanced on the bases of empirical studies that profiles young people’s use of their off-farm and leisure time, their behaviors, attitudes towards violence and the interrelationships and causal links between these factors.

Unfortunately, we have surprisingly little empirically based knowledge to understand the foregoing. This study, whose saliency cannot be overemphasized given the current fragile political situation of the country, was an attempt to fill this knowledge gap.

1.3 Main Objective

The main objective of the study was to assess youth off-farm social activities, deviant behaviors, attitudes towards violence, and their implication for radicalization prevention in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities.

1.3.1 Specific Objectives

1. To determine the types and prevalence of off-farm social and pastime activities of youths in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities.
2. To assess youth’s deviant behaviors and attitudes towards violence in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities.
3. To evaluate the relationship between youth off-farm social activities and their deviant behaviors and attitudes towards violence in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities.
4. To propose a theory of change and action-oriented framework for radicalization prevention and peacebuilding in Mbanga and Douala IV municipalities.

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