23/04/2026
""𝐇𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫. 𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐇𝐞 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐖𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐅𝐨𝐫.
We called him Mongo.
Not his real name, of course. His real name was Blaise Mongo Essomba, but nobody in our cycle used "Blaise." That felt too respectful for someone like him. Mongo was enough. Short, dismissive — exactly how we saw him.
Patrick and I gave him that nickname in our first year of the engineering cycle, sometime around the third week of lectures when Mongo stood up to answer a question from Dr. Hamidou during an Environmental Systems module and said — with full chest confidence — that biological oxygen demand was "the oxygen that living things demand when they are tired."
The entire amphitheatre collapsed.
Even Dr. Hamidou turned toward the board to hide his face.
Patrick leaned over and whispered, "This one passed the concours by accident." I nodded. We both laughed until our ribs hurt.
That was 2011.
I am telling you this story from my one-bedroom apartment in Ngaoundéré town in 2024, where I share a mattress with my younger brother because I cannot afford a second bed. Patrick called me last week from Douala. He had not eaten a proper meal in two days.
And Mongo?
Mongo just completed his second house.
PART ONE — The Dullest Engineer in the Cycle
Let me paint you the picture properly so you understand.
To enter ENSAI Ngaoundéré, you must survive the national concours — one of the most punishing competitive entrance exams in Cameroon. Thousands sit. A few hundred enter. It is not a place for average minds, or so we believed.
Patrick Nguele and I were the acknowledged stars of our cohort. I had ranked in the top fifteen nationally in the concours. Patrick had come from a Classes Préparatoires background in Yaoundé — two brutal years of mathematics and physics that sharpened a man like a blade. We sat in the front row. We answered questions before they were fully asked. Lecturers nodded when they saw our names on answer sheets.
Mongo sat at the back.
Always at the back, near the window that faced the mango tree, with a cheap Pilot biro that had no cap and a notebook that looked like it had been rescued from a flood. He wrote slowly. He asked slow, basic questions — the kind that made other students shift in their seats with secondhand embarrassment.
What irritated us most was that Mongo had somehow passed the same concours we passed. Same exam. Same day. How? Patrick had a theory involving "some arrangement from his village." I laughed and agreed, because it was easier than accepting that the concours was simply unpredictable.
During group project work, Patrick and I would finish our sections in one evening. Mongo would still be "thinking about the problem statement" two days later.
We stopped including him in group work by the second semester.
"He will drag down the final report," Patrick said. I did not disagree.
What made it worse was Mongo's unbothered energy. He didn't fight for grades the way we did. He didn't stay in the library until midnight. He wasn't chasing professors for clarifications or re-reading lecture notes three times over. He moved through the programme slowly, like a man walking in rain who has already accepted that he will get wet.
At the end of year one, Patrick and I posted the top two scores in the cohort. Mongo passed — but just barely. We celebrated. We did not invite him.
By second year, Patrick had started calling him "l'ingénieur de secours" — the emergency engineer. As in, the one who squeezed through so real engineers could feel better about themselves. Everyone laughed. Even students who had never spoken to Mongo laughed, because laughing at Mongo was a kind of social currency in our corridor.
He never reacted badly. He would just look at whoever was laughing with those calm, heavy-lidded eyes — and nod slowly. Like he was filing the moment away somewhere deep.
I should have understood what that nod meant.
I did not.
PART TWO — The Day We Left Him Behind
Graduation ceremony, 2014.
ENSAI engineering graduations carry weight. You are not just receiving a certificate — you are being received into a professional class. There are handshakes from the Director. There are photographs. Families travel from across the country.
Patrick graduated with honors. I graduated second in the cohort. We wore our gowns and stood tall and our families wept in that particular Cameroonian way — part joy, part relief, part "now go and feed us."
Mongo graduated too. Quietly. Without fanfare. His mother was there — a small, soft-spoken woman from the South who had sold condiments at a market for years to keep him in the programme. She held his engineering certificate with both hands and pressed it to her chest like it was a living thing. Mongo stood beside her with that same unbothered expression.
Patrick murmured to me, "Even his graduation has no energy."
We took no photographs with him.
We already had our eyes forward. I had applied to an environmental consulting firm in Yaoundé. Patrick was targeting a position at MINEE — the Ministry of Water and Energy. We were engineers. We were moving.
Mongo told someone quietly that he was "going back home to start something small."
We translated that as: Mongo has accepted defeat.
PART THREE — The Years That Taught Us
Year one after graduation, life performed exactly as I had written it in my mind.
The consulting firm took me. Decent salary. I rented a room in Yaoundé, sent money home, bought myself a small bag that looked professional. I was an engineer. I walked like one. I talked like one.
Patrick got a short-term contract position at MINEE. Temporary, but with promise — or so we told ourselves and each other.
By year three, the story began to rewrite itself without our permission.
My firm restructured. In Cameroon, "restructuring" is a soft word for a hard thing — someone above has eaten what was meant for those below. I was released with a handshake and two months' pay. I told myself it was temporary. I moved back to Ngaoundéré. I sent applications to every ministry, every NGO, every water board that had an email address.
Some replied. Most did not.
Patrick's contract was not renewed. He drifted to Douala chasing a consultancy tender that took eight months to be awarded — and when it was, it went to a man whose uncle sat on the evaluation committee. Patrick started doing small engineering reports for other people's projects. Half the work. A quarter of the credit. None of the billing rate an ENSAI engineer deserved.
We called each other regularly in those years. Two engineers — decorated ones — reminding each other of our credentials.
"The system is corrupt," Patrick would say.
"These connections, this tribalism," I would add.
We had excellent analyses of our situation.
None of them paid rent.
PART FOUR — The Name I Heard at a Funeral
I attended the funeral of a classmate's uncle in Ngaoundéré — a large compound funeral, the kind that takes three days and feeds three hundred people.
I was standing near the food line, holding my plate, when two men behind me began talking.
"You see this water system they installed for the whole compound? Clean, pressurized, no CAMWATER wahala — who did that?"
"Essomba's company. BM Essomba Environmental Solutions. The man donated the full installation as a funeral gift. Just like that."
"Which Essomba?"
"The engineer. Young man. He just finished a sanitation contract for two municipalities in Adamawa. Government contract. His office is in town."
My spoon stopped in the air.
BM Essomba.
Blaise Mongo Essomba.
I set my plate down. I found the compound host and asked, carefully, casually, like a man who was simply making conversation. Yes. Same person. ENSAI graduate. Environmental engineer. After graduation he had gone back to his home area and started fixing broken borehole pumps in villages — the work nobody wanted because it paid poorly and felt beneath a graduate. Then he learned water treatment systems. Then sanitation infrastructure. Then he registered a company. Trained a small team. Won his first government contract in 2019. Then a second. Then a third.
"He doesn't make noise," the host said, "but everywhere you go in this Adamawa, you will find his work on the ground."
I drove home that evening without the radio on.
PART FIVE — The Vacancy That Broke My Pride
Three months later, Patrick called.
"Armand. Have you heard about Mongo?"
"Something," I said carefully.
"He is recruiting. Senior Environmental Engineer position — Vina division project. Someone sent me the announcement. The company name is BM Essomba Environmental Solutions."
There was silence on the line. The kind of silence that carries weight.
Two ENSAI-trained engineers. Products of the national concours. Sitting in our separate small rooms, staring at a job vacancy posted by the man we spent four years calling l'ingénieur de secours.
"Will you apply?" Patrick asked quietly.
I did not answer immediately.
But hunger is a very efficient editor of pride.
I submitted my CV.
Mongo called me personally. His voice was exactly as I remembered — slow, warm, unbothered, like a man who had never once lost sleep over what other people thought of him.
He said nothing about the past. No "remember when you laughed at my answer in Dr. Hamidou's class." No score-settling. He simply said:
"Armand, I have seen your profile. You have solid experience. Come, let's talk."
His office was real — not a container, not a borrowed desk in someone else's building. A proper registered office with a receptionist, a company pickup truck outside carrying his logo, and a project map pinned to the wall showing active sites across three regions.
He offered me the position.
And then — only then — he leaned back in his chair and smiled that slow, unhurried smile.
"You know, I used to watch you and Patrick from the back row. You two were sharp. Fast. I admired that. I just knew I was going to take a different road to arrive."
That was all he said.
No insult. No triumph. Just the quiet confidence of a man who had never needed our validation — not then, and certainly not now.
I accepted the position.
EPILOGUE — What the Back Row Knew
Patrick is still in Douala. He is proud — the particular stubborn pride of a brilliant man who cannot yet reconcile his results with his self-image. He has not called Mongo. Perhaps he will, when the hunger speaks louder than the pride.
As for me — I arrive at BM Essomba Environmental Solutions every morning at seven-thirty. I work hard. I have stopped mentioning to people that I once ranked in the top fifteen in the national concours, because I have learned, slowly and painfully, that nobody is eating from a ranking that is ten years old.
On my first day, I noticed something on Mongo's desk.
A Pilot biro. No cap.
Same as university. I almost smiled — and then I stopped myself, because I finally understood. That biro was never a sign of carelessness.
It was just a man who cared about the work, not the packaging.
I am still learning to tell the difference.
Mock no one. The road is longer than your transcript, and you do not know whose gate you will be knocking on before it ends.
~ THE END ~
A KO.LI.KA Ventures Original Story
