Editorial

They lived like they'd never die. Yet some died like they never lived. Some have faded away into obscurity, living in foreign lands where they wield ABSOLUTELY no power. Change indeed is the only constant. A constant that takes different forms. My reflection below.

Reflection part 2:


There is a pattern.
A political pattern.
A pattern that followers of political events, especially events in third world “dictocracies” whose electoral systems suffer from ACUTE ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION can use to precisely and concisely predict outcomes of political movements.
Give it any name. On my part, I’d prefer to call it “Dictators’ Gun Powder Cake Theory”.

We begin in the Caribbean. On June 5th 1980, in what the Guinness Book of Records listed as one of the three most expensive weddings, Jean Claude Duvalier AKA Baby Doc got married to Michele Bennett. This was paving a new hopeless trajectory for the Haitian people. Under his rule, remotely controlled by his wife, Baby Doc of Haiti, taking after his father - Papa Doc – who was himself a ruthless dictator, perpetrated medieval-styled savagery. He and his family literally pocketed the national income of the country, asphyxiated or rather sentenced economic growth to death and institutionalized voodooism while the average Haitian could barely afford a pair of shoes, not to mention three square meals a day.
All these were ingredients that constituted a perfect recipe of Baby Doc’s Gun Power Cake which awaited an ignition. The ignition!! A shopping spree by the dictator’s wife in France during which she spent a whopping $1.5 Million on clothes while the country suffered food and fuel shortages amidst corruption and many other ills. Many of such had taken place before but this was the tipping point that put an end to his rule. He fled to France aboard a U.S. air force jet on the 7th of February 1986, leaving behind less than $500,000 in the state treasury.

Next on my list is Idi Amin Dada. The buffoonery perpetrated by this Ugandan blood thirsty dictator was larger than his personality but extraordinarily insignificant when it comes to his brutality. A brute in the making, a sadist compared to none other on the African continent in recent times. His official title.. “His excellency, President for life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beast of the earth and fishes of the sea and conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in particular” was among some of his many theatrics he bamboozled the international community with while his henchmen flooded and choked Ugandan streams and rivers with the blood and bodies of innocent civilians.
 Seizing power in a military coup d’état on the 25th of January 1971, it wasn’t long before this tinpot dictator started putting together ingredients for his gun powder cake. But first, he needed a promotion to Field Marshal and that, he accorded himself. And then, his ingredients; Human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption and gross economic mismanagement just to name a few. All of these were enough to build dissent from within and abroad which served as a matchbox.  The ignition came when Amin attempted to use his infamous, ragtag army that was specialized in killing unarmed civilians to annex the Kagera Province of Tanzania in 1978. This triggered the Ugandan-Tanzanian war and led to the demise of Amin’s eight-year old regime leading him to flee into exile to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia where he lived until his death on August 16th 2003.

Maybe we take a turn to North Africa. Zine Al Abedine Ben Ali. A somewhat political tactician who became prime minister and later booted out Tunisia’s first post-independence ruler, Habib Bourguiba, in a bloodless coup on grounds that the president was “mentally unfit” to rule. He is credited to have overseen some level of economic growth and praised for his progressive stance on women’s rights and economic reforms. Sounds like he was doing great, right?
Ben Ali’s “gun powder cake” ingredients comprised of rising unemployment among a large section of the youth population and large sections of the Tunisian interior languishing in poverty. In the characteristic of many dictators, he became omnipresent with giant posters of his face in public spaces. He quelled political dissent and was on many occasions accused by human rights groups of unfairly arresting and maltreating critics. Protests were not tolerated and there was rising resentment of the perceived corruption of the elite.

 The ignition here isn’t or wasn’t a metaphor but a real one. Mohammed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian graduate had the cart of vegetables he was selling to support his family seized by a police officer. He self-immolated and died later in the hospital. This triggered nation-wide.

Melaine Nsaikila: Fulbright Scholar, Economist and Development Enthusiast. 

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Melaine Nsaikila

23.Jan.2017

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Akere Muna

20.Jan.2017

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Teachers are not to blame for the ongoing strike action. Rather parents and guardians no longer feel that their children are secured by soldiers, Gendarmes, Police and BIR known for their brutish military attitude. Parents have not forgotten even in a hurry the carnage, atrocities such as rape,torture, looting, maiming and killing of the very students and people they have to safeguard and protect such as was the case in Buea, Bambili, Kumba and Victoria.

The state should retrain all their soldiers on the respect of human right as well as train them in other disciplines such as mining, agriculture, tourism, food processing and transformation etc so that they can become useful to the state and the economy.
The state should engage in a frank and sincere desire to implement the resolutions of the meetings held by the Ad hoc committee.

The state must come to term with this resounding caution; that it's the people of a particularly defined geographical location that make up a state and not the the state that makes people.
No state has ever won a war against its people even it has the most brutish and barbaric military tendencies as well as the use of the most sophisticated weapons.

Wiping out the cultural identity of a people is genocidal and no amount of violence no matter how heinous can completely wipe out a people.
La Republique du Cameroun must discard criminal plans hatched against the Anglophones in their hidden agenda tagged agenda 06 that was designed by Usman Mey aimed at destroying all English values through the forceful integration of the erstwhile Southern Cameroon's as transformed francophones.

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Bernard Ndim

17.Jan.2017

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After last Monday's  Ghost Town Operation that grounded activities in the two English speaking regions of Cameroon (North West and South West Regions) pundits and political observers have begun questioning the power the government exercises over these two Regions.
This can be attributed to the fact that on Monday January 9, 2017, which was the day for the resumption of the second term for the 2016/2017 academic year, the Anglophone consortium had announced that no school or business activity will be functional in the above mentioned regions.

But in its usual mannerisms, Paul Biya’s 34 year-old government has since the commencement of the Anglophone strike last November 2016, used all means ranging from attempted bribery, intimidation, threats, manipulation and even arbitrary arrests, instead of finding solutions to the concerns raised by the consortium. It has tacitly decided to go the Judas way.

Numerous press releases, radio announcements and reports were done via the state media, CRTV, stating that effective classes will resume as per the academic calendar. In an interview last week before the Ghost Town was observed, Tassang Wilfred, one of the members of the Consortium said “come Monday 9, we will see who controls Bamenda.”

The government, after dispatching a handful of Ministers with bags of money to bribe the teachers and traditional rulers in an attempt coerce their subjects into calling off the strike in both the North West and South West Regions, saw their efforts thrown to the trash as the Ghost Town Operation was a heavy success.

Political pundits have since then applauded the unity and togetherness expressed by Cameroonians of the English speaking expression, who for decades now, complain of gross injustice and marginalization. What was termed the Buea declaration now goes by the name “the Anglophone problem.”

While the academic year throughout Cameroon risks being cancelled by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization, UNESCO, if the students do not return to school this week so as to complete the required 900 hours of lecture a year, the government is on a hot seat as dialogue stalls.

A local newspaper reported that the strike might have just revealed how less popular the Anglophone Ministers including the Prime Minister who hails from the North West Region, are. After repeated attempts, they could not calm their people down; talk less of persuading them to call off the strike.

This, one can conclude, just goes a long way to show that these appointed Ministers have no influence on their people as not even spending a weekend with them can cause them to change their minds. To be continued…

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13.Jan.2017

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Would the erstwhile Southern Cameroonian be Complaining this much if the federal structure of two States of equal status were maintained?

 History being our judge will accept with us that we won't have been in this grave and muddy situation of trying to blend beans and  corn paste. We must admit that water and kerosene can't blend, no matter what?

Why were the the former State of West Cameroon swallowed by the erstwhile Easy Cameroon after only after eleven years after the 1961 plebiscite and reduced to two provinces of the purported United Republic of Cameroon?

 I will once more say that their purported French brothers never had any good intention towards the erstwhile West Cameroonians.

 Are the strikes and complaints made by the Consortium today scars of poorly treated abscess of the failed 1961 Federal structure that was born as a result of the plebiscite?

 For sure and as certain as the night and dawn are aspects which we can't change. When issues are poorly handled and when deceit and manipulation becomes a means of governance, discontentment  and violent anger is brewed like beer and must explode. Today we are witnessing this explosion and how humiliated the state has been?

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Bernard Ndim

12.Jan.2017

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In 2011, this is what was published in the book "A Global State through democratic federal world government" by Unity Elias Y. in pages 362, 363, 364; on the Anglophone problem. For reading purposes, get it here;

"The secret behind all successful democracies of the world is their strict adherence to Jefferson’s advice of respecting the opinions of mankind, and a fitting example in this case is to examine and compare the state and situation of bilingual Canada, an advanced democracy, with bilingual Cameroon, an amateur democracy. Both nations have English and French as official languages of government, business and teaching in school. The two nations have secessionist movements operating in their minority territory; which, for Canada, is the province of Quebec (French-speaking), and, for Cameroon, is the former state of Southern Cameroons (English-speaking), which was induced into a federated union with the former East Cameroon by the UN. In the case of Quebec in Canada, the province has all possibilities of attaining independence through democratic channels, whereas Southern Cameroonians have not even got the freedom to express their grievances; even when they do express them they are silently ignored, and instead, the government goes ahead to implant more structures to suppress any secessionist activity.

If wisdom were easy to come by, the government in Yaoundé should have been preoccupied with opening the cover of the boiling pot to reduce the pressure inside by engaging in purposeful dialogue with the anglophone opinion, rather than trying to pull off the wood that burns to boil the water inside the pot, because the wood can always be replaced with more from the vast forest, which nurtures even more violently burning wood as the days pass by and the realities of life are confronted by the younger trees, which usually have expectations and intensions to grow taller than their parents.

‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ the saying goes. While the Ottawa government spends time in dialogues with Quebec and with ever-increasing intensions to please this minority French community, the hegemony in Yaoundé does not want to hear of any anglophone problem, and under the pretence of national unity and integration, such a sensitive, time bomb issue is relegated to the list inconsequential in government priorities. In fact, it entails free and genuine education for the French-speaking community to realise that the English-speaking Cameroonian might have a better story to tell about what holds for the tomorrow of the nation.

After all, every practical man knows that the English culture from experience is more functional than the predominantly French procedural way of life. Grave error number two is in trying to cage the anglophone folk by removing their political liberty, which is unworkable, because political liberty and maturity are amongst the inalienable rights enshrined in every human being by natural law and re-emphasised by human law, and when one tries to arrest such rights by forceful confiscation, one commits a crime as a result.

The victim is pushed to the wall, from where he fights back. Should the anglophones in Cameroon resort to violence as a means of restoring their political rights, which are strongly required for self-determination and development, Yaoundé alone stands to blame for nurturing the dissatisfaction amongst a people who got up one morning to realise that the marriage was an aching one rather than a comforting one. This is quite authentic because a union is purposeless if it does not breed harmony, peace and progress, and if the true picture of life rather than its caricature is to be tackled. If Yaoundé wants to handle caricatures rather than substance, then undoubtedly, the whole system will grind to a halt subsequently. Greed should not continue to block the foresight of politicians and governments.

Great men have existed, men who placed reason ahead of self-pride men of humility, compromise and peace. Anwar al-Sadat, the pioneer searcher for peace in the Middle East pandemonium, extended his hand, which was still stained with the blood of Israeli combatants and civilians to Prime Minister Begin, whose own hand, too, was still shaking off the fresh blood of Egyptians just after the famous 1973 war. Ever since this unprecedented show of compromise, a perfect peace had reigned between the two nations. Sadat used the ensuring peace to build the Egyptian economy. "

Click here to buy your copy of this book.

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Elias Yang

09.Jan.2017

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