An interesting piece of article, my dear compatriot, though full of efforts to justify the SDF chairman’s conciliation with the system over the past years. And in the course of justification, a man tries to magnify the positive sides without acknowledging weaknesses.
1. While the inhabitants of the Northwest province suffered the most repression from the system from 1990, it must be borne in mind that the Northwest political leaders especially of the SDF betrayed the essence of the struggle the most. Besides with the wind of change generated by Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika that was sweeping the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cameroon wasn't going to be spared. It happened in Bamenda because the SDF founding fathers acted faster than other Kamerunians at home and abroad and launched the party that May 26, 1990.
2. It was fool-hardy of the callers to expect something extraordinary to happen in Bamenda when deep within many SDF and opposition circles, it was known that no opposition figure could win the heavily rigged elections.
3. Peterkins is on the defensive when he ought not to be by advocating that Northwesterners fought to win 19 0f the 20 seats in 2002. Why not all the 20? He fails to think that it was by design that the Biya regime decided to retain one seat in Bali and deprive the SDF of seats elsewhere in order to sell its lies that SDF was a Northwest party. When Ngwasiri, Mbah Ndam and Fru Ndi accepted that result because they wanted money from participating in Parliament and the council, they betrayed the principle of a struggle, which is that of changing a system. Those who quit in protest were union nationalists with far-reaching revolutionary vision and not trapped by self-interest and regional bias. Today the acceptance of the 2002 results came to haunt Fru Ndi in the 2004 presidential masquerade. They game him victory only in the Northwest. Who is to blame? Fru Ndi and his clique for being suckers or his former partners who honestly told him back in 2002 that he was making the SDF with 70% of popular support a sucker by accepting the results. So get this straight. The biggest traitors to the SDF were Northwestern politicians. Cameroon shall change when Betis accept that Biya is a traitor, when Northwesterners accept that Fru Ndi and his clique betrayed the essence of the struggle, and when Kamerunians come to terms with the Anglophone(have mostly done) and Bamileke factors.
4. In the general Cameroonians struggle, close to a million died in the other provinces until 1970, and they are wary of betrayal from comrades in arms. From 1990, some 200 Kamerunians died in the struggle, more than half from the Northwest province. Since 1990, Northwest led in activism, but was far behind (4th) in financial and logistical contribution to the party. The province did not pay the highest price for supporting the SDF.
I hear Fru Ndi and co denigrating the Bamenda people by calling them politicians when all Kamerunians are engaged in a struggle to change this horrible system. That is an insult. Exponents of change are not politicians who are out for an interest; rather, they are out for an ideal.
The Union Moujik
by Janvier Chando,
The Girl on the Trail
by Janvier Chouteu-Chando
