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
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 others.
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) where 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 (all
former members of the country’s sole political party from 1972-1990)that he had 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 1982. During his three decade, the country has experienced
the biggest proportionate embezzlement of state funds ever recorded in Africa
and holds the record for the country with the worst peacetime impoverishment in
Africa.
Today, president Paul Biya is presiding over a nation where more
than 80% of its physicians are abroad, 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.
People unfamiliar with the Cameroonian situation would be
wondering why such an abysmal situation persists. Well; the answer is simple.
It is the system and the people.
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 interests 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
in strategic 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 looked 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...” , backing the ruling party and ensuring its victory in
other regions of the country.
How could that have happened? Politically-shocked Cameroonians
have been asking this question.
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.
In a nutshell, what was supposed to be a
Cameroonian revolution that became a political comedy 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 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 Cameroonians made was that when the
clamor for change began, they followed Cameroonians who did not have 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,
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 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) from attaining power. The
system in Cameroon is a collection of individual interests 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 translated 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 found itself even more vulnerable.
Now, by the open and
hidden collaborators of the system
openly embracing 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 to transition into an autocratic system, thereby ensuring its survival
in a morphed form. The rapidly
changing system needs a strong man to be autocratic. This would be
someone who has hands on the job as a 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 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 Cameroon'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 can 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 the Cameroonian people confine the legacies of the Ahidjo-Biya
regimes and the suffocating French-imposed system to the dustbin of
history.
Janvier Tchouteu 06/04/2013
