A specter looms in the lives of every Cameroonian child, man or woman. It is
the living president of the land in the middle of Africa, the land that is often referred to as the microcosm of
the continent. The specter is President Paul Biya of Cameroon. When rumors
spread like wildfire in June 2004 that he had just died, there were widespread
scenes of jubilation all across the half a million square kilometer landmass
called Cameroon. Days after, he returned home from abroad where he had been spending intermittently about
six months every year for over two decades ,
and then declared to the sycophants waiting to
receive him at the airport that there would be a …. “Rendez-vous in 20 years
time with those who wish me dead…”
Cameroonians were not
the only ones who disbelieved him when he made that pronouncement among other
things. Many of those who follow
political developments in the world in general and in Africa and Cameroon in particular, marveled at his audacity.
After all, more than 80% of the Cameroonian population loathed his rule; he was
already in power for more than two decades as the head of state, after having
been the country’s prime minister (1972-1982) or the second most powerful
person in the system put in place by the French overlords. But Paul Biya proved everyone wrong. He
pulled off another electoral charade and declared himself winner in the October
2004 presidential elections, and then changed his constitution in 2008 that would allow him to run for two more
presidential 7-year terms (despite
the deaths of 150 protesting Cameroonians caused by his forces), meaning that
he could be president until the year 2025 (a record 43 years in power) when he would be 92 years of age. By the time Biya held another masquerade called presidential elections in October 2011, he had
successfully humbled the internationally recognized opposition heads (who are
all former members of the country’s sole political party from 1972-1990 that he
has been leading since 1984), promised to give them positions in his government
and made it known in plain terms that the system and the puppeteer (France)
would never allow political change in Cameroon.
The 80-year old Paul
Biya is variously described as the Maradona (he fakes and wins elections just
like Maradona faked and scored a goal in his “Hand of God” goal) of Cameroonian
and African politics, the master of presidential patricide (he devoured his
predecessor who handed power to him, leading to first Cameroonian president
Ahmadou Ahidjo’s exile, death and burial abroad—Senegal), the absentee
president, the vindictive president, the evil president, etc, etc.
As a German colony from
1884-1916, Kamerun was considered an “African Pearl” for its robust economy and
highest literacy rate in the continent. Despite the period of instability during the
country’s war of liberation that ended with the French Trusteeship masters
handing power to those who never asked or fought for it (the puppets that
constitute the system today), agricultural recovery and the discovery of oil in
the 1970s saw Cameroon emerge as Africa’s eight largest economy and the world’s
second fastest growing in the early 1980s. Its economy was expected to grow
twenty times over the next thirty years, but it barely double. Everything
changed after Paul Biya was handed power in November 1982 by the first French-installed president Ahmadou Ahidjo. Since then, Cameroon has experienced the
biggest proportionate embezzlement of state funds ever recorded in Africa and it holds the record as the country in Africa that has experienced the worst peacetime impoverishment since 1960.
Today, president Paul
Biya is presiding over a nation where more than 80% of its physicians are
abroad, where more than 90% of its doctorate degree holders are abroad, where
Cameroonians invest abroad more than at home, where Cameroonians are voting
against the system with their feet; today, Cameroon’s neighbors who before envied its high
standards of living and saw it as a place of
refuge and opportunities, now find Cameroonians envying them as they forge ahead with a sense of direction while
Cameroon lags behind in its spiral towards total, complete and horrifying
economic, social and political decay.
People unfamiliar with
the Cameroonian situation would be wondering why such an abysmal situation
persists. Well; the answer is simple. Cameroon finds today in a quicksand
situation because of the anachronistic system put in place by Gaullist France
when General Charles De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and decided to make
France's former colonies and territories members of the United Nations Organization
(UNO) while controlling them with transparent or invisible strings this time is
round. French Cameroon and British Southern Cameroons achieved independence and
reunification, only for the people to find that the new country is
quasi-independent under a broader French template of control variously
described as FrancAfrique. The system has traumatized, demoralized, divided and
dehumanized the Cameroonian people over the years.
The Gaullist system in
place was put by the French to exclude from political power the nationalists
advocating for the reunification and independence of the divided territories of
the former German Kamerun, nationalists who commanded the support of more than
80% of the populations of both territories of British Cameroons and French
Cameroun. The system is a partnership of French imperial interest in Africa
(economic and political) otherwise known as Francafrique and its Cameroonian
collaborators (the renegades and anti-nationalists who never opposed and who do
not object to French neo-colonial stranglehold of Cameroon.)
The system has been
effective in infecting the minds of many Cameroonians, reducing them to a state
of hopelessness and luring them to direct their energy not at the Biya regime
and the system, but at their neighbors. The system has successfully elevated
corruption and the divide-and-rule strategy into an art—it has promoted the
notion of settlers and indigenes, it has encouraged ethno-centrism, tribalism,
clannishness, regional jingoism, sectarianism and other forms of division. We
see a total and complete absence of strategic or even tactical planning when it
comes to the economic and social development of the nation. We see a complete
absence of social solidarity.
To compound the division
and confusion among the people who reject the Biya regime and the
French-imposed system, the so-called opposition leaders these freedom-craving
Cameroonians had been looking up to have now been absorbed back into the system, leaving the
struggling Cameroonian masses distrustful of politicians in general.
Today, the down-trodden Cameroonian people are in a state of political
lethargy.
When Paul Biya called
for the holding of senate elections in April 2013, eighteen years after his
parliament promulgated a law to create one; most Cameroonians thought it would
be another charade, as usual. It made no sense for the so-called opposition parties with a
semblance of representation in parliament to glorify the charade with their
participation. Most Cameroonians knew the system was sustaining these so-called
opposition leaders financially and that some of them were in the government;
but Cameroonians were not prepared for the extent to which these politicians
would go to insult their intelligence. But deals between the ruling party and
the opposition were made all right, the electoral masquerade took place and the
people saw the ruling party campaigning for the so-called main opposition
(Social Democratic Front—SDF) in some regions of the country; and the SDF in
the words of its chairman or president John Fru Ndi “…one good turn deserves another...”, openly
backed the ruling party, thereby ensuring its victory in other regions of the
country.
How could that have
happened? Politically-shocked Cameroonians have been asking themselves ever
since the April 2013 open fornication between the ruling party and the
so-called opposition political parties.
To prevent chaos and
ensure a smooth succession, SDF spokes-persons and apologists quip. Paul Biya
has a deal with the SDF to hand over power to one of its members, echoes some
anonymous voices from the SDF.
If you ask me, my answer
is that what was supposed to be a Cameroonian revolution that began on on May
26, 1990, became a political comedy played by former members of the system, a
political comedy that has gone full circle. The worldwide wind of change generated by
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika that swept away authoritarian
systems in Eastern Europe and Africa, and that stirred the vast majority of
Cameroonians in the 1990s to risk their lives in the streets demanding
political change, was effectively controlled by the system. The desire for
change that more than 80% of Cameroonians have has been hijacked by the authoritarian system in
Cameroon and the so-called leaders of the opposition. The people got taken for a ride.
The biggest mistake made
by Cameroonians was that when the clamor for change began, they followed
Cameroonians who had no democratic
credentials, people who hardly a year before were in the upper echelons of power in the system, but who at the time claimed they had the left ruling
party and now opposed it. All the so-called heads
of what the world knows today as the prominent opposition parties in Cameroon
(John Fru Ndi of the SDF, Bello Bouba Maigari of the UNDP, Ndam Njoya of the
CDU etc) were members of the ruling party right up to the year 1990, when the
system was forced to accept multi-party politics in Cameroon. Like the Pied
Piper, these so-called opposition leaders lured freedom-starved Cameroonians
into greater despondence and political lethargy. Such a feat was achieved only
because Cameroonian union-nationalists, revolutionaries, democrats and patriots
who had always rejected the
system, thought these so-called heads of the so-called new opposition, these people who were the first to make the moves to create political parties, shared the
vision of the “New Cameroon” that Cameroonians fought, died and voted for, a
vision that achieved the land's reunification and independence (
though it has never been real because it got usurped by the evil system that today is under the leadership of Paul Biya
and his French puppeteers.), but
that is yet to realize democracy, freedom, liberalism, progress, justice,
equality and development.
False are the statements
by members of the compromised opposition that had they not openly embraced the
Biya regime and the system, chaos would have ensued in Cameroon incase Biya exited the political scene. The statement is false because the system
in Cameroon is authoritarian, not autocratic.
Authoritarian regimes are
usually coated with a sublime idea (that could be political—Stalinism/Marxism/Communism,
Fascism etc—or that could be religious—Iranian and Taliban theocracy etc)
or with an interest arrangement (FrancAfrique). In Cameroon, the system is
built around preventing those who believe in the Cameroonian struggle (the
union-nationalists, otherwise called the Kamerunists) from attaining power. The
system in Cameroon is a collection of individual interest groups, bringing
together the propagators of French neo-colonialism and their collaborators in
Cameroon. Paul Biya is the head of the collaborationists. And in many ways,
he has been acting over the years as an absentee president. Meanwhile, the
state has been functioning zombie-like during his quasi-presence.
Though the mortifying arrangement suited the interest of the puppeteers
and the beneficiaries of the system, it exposed the system to popular uprisings
since that translates as the beneficiaries of the system not being clearly
or functionally organized. With the advent of social media, globalization, the
maturity of post-independence generations that never benefited from
the system; and with the soldiers of the 1990s phase of the struggle
dissociating themselves from the so-called opposition leaders; the
authoritarian system now finds itself even more vulnerable. The
authoritarian system would be faced by a new political force that never associated
itself with the system, a new political force that embodies the spirit of
the century old struggle for the “NEW KAMERUN” or “NEW CAMEROON”
that confronted German colonial control, stood up to French
duplicity in the land in a war that decimated more than half a million of
its supporters; the authoritarian system would be faced by a new force
that embraces the legacy of those who fought and voted for the
independence and reunification of Cameroon, a new force that rejects all the
values of the system that the French put in place to control the destiny
of Cameroon , a six-decade old evil system that can only lead the country
to abyss.
Now, as the open and
hidden collaborators of the system openly embrace one another (the ruling
party and the so-called heads of the so-called opposition parties) starting
with the recent senatorial charade, the system is encouraging the creation of elite groups of
beneficiaries who see or think that their
political and economic survival rests only in a
continuation or sustenance of the system. We are observing the evolvement of a
system that is shedding any pretense of limited political pluralism; we are observing
the entrenchment of a system that openly views the people as its number one
enemy. Such a system then becomes autocratic.
In a nutshell,
Cameroon’s so-called opposition political parties that are in symbiosis with
the authoritarian system are aiding the system in
its gradual transition into an autocratic system, thereby ensuring its survival
in a morphed form. The rapidly changing system needs a strong man to be truly autocratic. This would be
someone who has hands on the job to act as the president, someone who the French
puppeteers would like to portray as the benevolent despot.
It is the place of
post-independence Cameroonians to reject whatever farce the system comes up
with as change when power passes down to the generation after Paul Biya. By
absorbing former members of his party who for decades identified with the
opposition, Biya is trying to give Cameroonians and the rest of the world the
impression that Cameroon’s opposition is in sync with his vision for the
political evolution of Cameroon. Unfortunately, the system does not intend to
let the majority of Cameroonians participate or have a say in Cameroon’s
political development.
The New Cameroon will be
founded. Not by beneficiaries of the system (past and present) but by those who
always rejected it as an evil system that has been leading Cameroon into
abyss.
But then, in founding
the New Cameroon, patriotic, honest, democratic, unbiased and progressive
minded Cameroonians would have to reconcile a country where:
- the system made sure that most of its historic
figures who dedicated their lives and even died for the cause for
Cameroon's reunification and independence got killed and buried like dogs,
- the bodies of some of these historic figures that got
buried abroad are missing,
- a few of the historic figures who thought they could
contribute in nation-building got sidelined, cowed and humiliated by
the system,
- its first head of state died and is buried abroad,
- and where the people have been insulted for more than
five decades by the regimes of Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul through
an imposed minority system that sowed the seeds of division, corruption,
mediocrity, fear and despondence.
The ideals of the New
Cameroon hatched by the country's historic nationalists and developed over the
years by post-independence union-nationalists is Cameroon's only bargain
with the future. It is the only nucleus around which Cameroon can
reconcile with its turbulent past; it is the nucleus that all the
strata of Cameroonians society can connect to in the process of nation building;
it is the only nucleus around which a free, democratic, liberal, fair and prosperous
Cameroon can be built. The New Cameroon would lead the country to take its
merited place in the central African region, Africa as a whole and the world at
large. That would be possible only if we confine the legacies of the
Ahidjo-Biya regimes and the suffocating French-imposed system to the dustbin of
history.
Janvier Tchouteu 06/04/2013
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