Cameroon is burning. As this BBC story shows, this is what a future L3 crisis looks like in its infancy (that’s anticipation, not prediction). Now is the time for the United Nations to choose: an ounce of prevention or pounds upon pounds of protracted ‘cure’ while a country annihilates a generation of national endeavor.

Here is how the system works. There will be statements of concern and warnings of dire consequences. There will be several high-level visits to underscore the gravity of the situation. There will be steady economic decline, sporadic destruction and a deepening insecuritization of Cameroun until it becomes a full-blown high-intensity conflict and an enduring ‘complex emergency.

Here is how the system says it wants to work.’ It wants to stop the cancer of man-driven destruction when the first cells are detected, not after it metastasizes across the country and across a generation or two of its people. The “answer ultimately lies in far greater global leadership to find political solutions, along with a cultural, operational and financial reprioritization towards prevention.” (One Humanity, UNSG report  to the World Humanitarian Summit, ¶27).  Put differently, let’s throw resources into engineering peace long before it becomes ineffective or impossible to engineer peace (but at least creates the perception of action).

Here is what such a reprioritization should mean. Make Cameroon a top-3 international peace issue. Make that happen yesterday. Launch a major intervention the day after yesterday. Make Cameroon a higher priority than full-blown L3 crises such as Syria, CAR, South Sudan or Yemen because it is more important to stop this one rather than service existing crises (read: reprioritization either has consequences or it is lip service). Pull budget from those crises. How about 25% from each of those four? Pull top negotiators from those crises. Pull peacekeepers or others from those crises. Again, 25% and 25 %. Push a multi-pronged intervention. Push for UN Security Council resolutions that impose peace.  (To be clear, this reprioritization of crisis response should not override the humanitarian imperative, which should remain primarily a response to present, not future crisis.).

Overkill? Yes. What does political prevention look like if not overkill, because that is one way of understanding the definition of prevention (and perhaps the only way of stopping a war)?

Here is one problem (and a ‘solution’). The system is designed to produce pounds of cure rather than ounces of prevention.  The system is designed to ignore Cameroon until it cannot ignore Cameroon, just as it has waited for famine (Somalia 2011) or for Ebola to break containment and then respond, rather than take decisive earlier action. To change its ways, to effectuate this prioritization, the system needs to define a new mindset by using Cameroon as a test case. It needs to pre-empt years of moral high horse-ism and political paralysis. Just try something different. Learn from this test case and then adjust (iterative crisis prevention). In other words, don’t debate this, just do it and see what happens. Maybe it proves a bad idea. Blame me.

Here is another problem (and a ‘solution’). The system must avoid creating a new mindset that is simply an ‘act earlier’ version of the old mindset. As this review of DFID’s (earlier) response to the 2017 crisis in Somalia concluded [I’m a co-author], there is a danger in a system that seems obsessed with issues such as whether it averted a famine. “The review team is unequivocal as well – this is the wrong question. Beyond the difficulty of proving a negative, we see a risk in setting the bar too high, leaving a system unable to respond in timely fashion unless one can establish a looming crisis of unprecedented proportions or ‘perfect storms’ of disaster.” (p. 9). The effectiveness of crisis prevention, in other words, requires the routine acceptance of having perhaps prevented nothing. Cameroon may stop burning on its own.  Let’s not wait and see.