The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2019

38 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL in expertise and productivity, Bob was not doing this out of pure altruism. Shipping fine finished pieces of ebony to his guitar factory in the States was a lot less expensive than shipping whole ebony logs. And apart from lowering his production costs, Cam- eroonians with good jobs represented the beginnings of a middle class that would eventually become consumers of his product. During one visit Bob was surprised when he entered the office of the local tax assessor, who made it clear that a large bribe was all it would take to give Crelicam and Taylor Guitars a clean tax audit for the year. He walked out of that tax office and straight into my office at the embassy to tell me what had hap- pened. Thanks to a close working relationship, the embassy soon had an audience with the minister of finance, a young, Western- trained, progressive and highly respected technocrat. By the time the meeting was over, Bob Taylor was promised a fair audit and was notified of his eligibility for a tax holiday for foreign investors who create Cameroonian jobs. While it is unfortunate that we had to go all the way to the ministerial level to get a just outcome, we were grateful for the opportunity to bring Crelicam to the minister’s attention. It was our way of building a healthy business “microclimate” around an American company in what was otherwise acknowledged to be a difficult business environ- ment. When it came to corporate social responsibility, Bob Taylor proved to be one of the finest examples of American entrepre- neurship. He won the Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence for his responsible harvesting of ebony, but he was not content to stop there. He forged a partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Congo Basin Institute in Yaoundé to grow ebony seed- lings, and developed a mechanism to make it worthwhile for small farmers to tend the seedlings until they could grow on their own. Investing more than half a million dollars of his own money, he got the program off the ground in Cameroon—and can now say that he is planting more ebony than he cuts down. We were so proud of his initiative that we planted two of his seedlings on the embassy compound and one at the ambassador’s residence, amplifying the program through a public diplomacy campaign. In Cameroon the reaction to the Taylor Guitars initiative was instructive. Pro-American sentiment went up wherever the Creli- cam story was told. French commercial logging companies came to us to ask how they could start similar reforestation programs. And the Chinese ambassador thanked me, as the example of Taylor Guitars helped him discipline some of the more wayward companies from his country. The Minister of Environment of Cameroon signed a private- public partnership agreement with the company at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bonn in 2017 to partner in ebony propagation under the direction of Taylor Guitars and the Congo Basin Institute. And the Cameroonian government sent a trade delegation to the United States to find more American companies like Taylor Guitars. The Taylor Guitars model served as the kernel around which we built our broader commercial engagement. The reputation for transparency we developed, as well as the new channels of communication we pioneered within the Cameroonian govern- ment and the private sector, created openings for other U.S. companies to successfully bid on and receive contracts and other opportunities. Michael S. Hoza entered the Foreign Service as a management-coned officer in 1985. He has served in 11 overseas postings, including as U.S. ambassador to Cameroon from 2014 to 2017. Bob Taylor, foreground, works with colleagues in Cameroon on the equipment he brought into the country. PHOTOSCOURTESYOFBOBTAYLOR