We are walking backwards and i'm not even kidding.

Some months ago, we were researching outsourcing some things to a certain API (I won’t call names). Then I decided to go through the official 'SDK' they provided, and it was bad. I could tell no one took the time- even AI wouldn’t be that bad. I advised against it: if the front looked like this, you don’t want to see the inside. Mind you, this API has a lot of sensitive user data. We spent a week building those features internally and moved on. Guess what? Two months later, that same company was hacked and involved in a huge data leak. My lesson from that is: never trust people with bad front-facing APIs. They are going to pull you down with them - one thing is sure: they will fall.

Now, fast forward to today. This rant starts with me Googling to buy a .cm domain, then nothing comes up. Next minute, I try the MTN Digital Center thingy (you saw it if you Googled like me). They have something listed there, but the moment you select a product, it throws a 500 error. Just by selecting a product! (Ah, can I trust their services?)

Next, I try to go through major players like Namecheap, but apparently no major domain name reseller can even interface with the body in charge of this service. So, nic.cm comes up.

So, who’s in charge of nic.cm again - oh, ANTIC. Wait a minute, aren’t these the same guys whose links to their website are broken? PAUSE - ANTIC is the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies; they are supposed to regulate Cameroon’s digital space. hmm. If the people in charge of the country’s tech aren’t even online, how are you supposed to trust anything about them? From what the headlines on Google show, if those pages load, it will be some poorly translated words about which documents I should take to 'so & so' office- for a domain? In 2025.

Anyway, I’d assume this is the same path anyone trying to get a .cm domain will walk; they will walk away thinking the same thing.

I didn’t write this to complain about a .cm checkout failure, now that I think about it. I wrote it because it’s the same story across 'official' tech: bad front, shaky back, zero accountability.

These are the same teams behind national systems. So be honest - if a product select throws 500, what happens when the table that holds pensions goes missing? Are you sure CNPS has your records right, or did someone drop a column and your dad’s pension now shows less than he contributed? We’ve already seen data leaks. These are the same tech people that consult for banks - do I keep money here if the outside stinks this much?

That’s what scares me. Not just broken links. Broken trust.

So is this the same space they want us to build for every day? There’s no foundation here, man… The gates are offline.