TFT Magazine | Cameroon News | Southern Cameroon News

By Ekoko Mandengué

Today, unskilled Chinese laborers are building our sports stadiums, shadowy Corsican Mafia interests run our national lottery -PMUC, SNEC has been sold to Moroccans and the Bolloré cartel brazenly fights- off Portuguese business interests as it seeks total control of all critical transportation infrastructure inside Cameroon(Bolloré already has controlling stakes in CAMRAIL and major logistics companies operating in Cameroon). Our children will not look kindly on us: the Indians will soon be growing our cassava in Nanga-Eboko, and Chinese immigrants are already frying our puff-puff. At this rate , the kuli-kuli and adakwa sold on our street corners will soon be flavored with Shanghai spit …

… If the illusion of progress in the New Deal government must be maintained, the youth must be railroaded into other unproductive efforts. Chinese, Indian, French and European investors will be drafted in their place. The youth must be dealt with using a very long stick. If the word ‘auto-development’ is noticeably absent from the vocabulary of Cameroonians today, it is because Biya knows that the idea of employing the youth in any such initiative would empower them considerably. They would come face to face with the fact that they have more power for effective change in the country that they would otherwise believe. They will learn that they are the agents of their progress. They are their own biggest assets. They are the future and the future is now! They are the people they’ve been waiting for!

Buea
Dear Uncle Ben Sikin,

I never had high expectations for 2008 which has now come and gone , and with it slipped another year of frayed hopes for Cameroon’s prospects . With deep anguish, we all lived- out the deepening descent into the all consuming abyss brought on this generation by a recidivist Biya and his ‘Raw Deal’.

It is fair to say that Cameroonians like you and I were invited to a dinner to be witnesses to the vile spectacle of a neo -colonial overlord, our host Biya, heave the contents of his insides, even as he tried unsuccessfully to hold back the irrepressible urges using our nation ’s flag. The experience has left us all drenched in the putrid slurry of organic grime, and with unsettling evidence of what our host has been eating in the weeks and years leading up to this macabre feast. We are repulsed at the pasty foul-smelling fluids splattered on our faces and the dinnerware , horrified that one man could spew so much vile. What’s worse? He is still convulsing, all indications are that he has much more to disgorge . He plans to make this one dinner we will not soon forget.

Our history and nation now bear the ineffaceable scars of Biya’s regime as it has sputtered, stalled and gasped on its itself for twenty -six years, forever unable to find its own footing and flailing frantically in search of a lifeline, grasping at anything to prevent it from descending into its unavoidable fate. It will be long remembered for its infanticidal impulses: On more than one occasion , the army has been given orders to use live bullets on disgruntled students in university campuses and during the riots in early 2008.

How else would we explain why Biya would call on Cameroonians to celebrate our country qualifying as a Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) program, only after all government-run restructuring programs had failed miserably. We forget, two decadesago, Biya had told Cameroonians in that our Nation was no ones private hunting turf . Today, unskilled Chinese laborers are building our sports stadiums, shadowy Corsican Mafia interests run our national lottery -PMUC, SNEC has been sold to Moroccans and the Bolloré cartel brazenly fights- off Portuguese business interests as it seeks total control of all critical transportation infrastructure inside Cameroon(Bolloré already has controlling stakes in CAMRAIL and major logistics companies operating in Cameroon). Our children will not look kindly on us: the Indians will soon be growing our cassava in Nanga-Eboko, and Chinese immigrants are already frying our puff-puff. At this rate , the kuli-kuli and adakwa sold on our street corners will soon be flavored with Shanghai spit .

Only through action can a man’s mettle be tested and proven out. One does not have to look too deep to expose the farce which men like Biya represent. We have long been reminded that he is indecisive: his record has borne that to be true . Yondo Black tells us that Biya is of the breed of men who was only trained to perform orders, never capable of a single original thought or idea , of conceiving and formulating them into actionable policies … this goes a long way towards explaining aloofness, his offhanded approach to governing. He revealed some of this in the comments he made after taking office ; “ My predecessor did not fail, I don’t intend to either”.

The only people who make no mistakes are people who do nothing . Men like Biya have an aversion to any undertaking which would open up the possibility of an encounter with failure, anything that would stain his self- perception as a man of action, and this means doing nothing. Naturally , he can always emerge as the triumphant leader of any successful endeavor, his position as president of the country entitles him to claim victories even if he was never in the battlefield . All his underlings hang pictures of ‘the great leader’ in their offices, and call his name whenever they make any public pronouncements or use the latrine.

Biya survives and thrives especially because he can create an alter ego of himself and insulate that alter ego from any confrontation with the realities outside him. Biya never attends the funerals of some of his closest collaborators, he might have to confront his own mortality there. Biya spends six months each year in Switzerland, he can afford to, after all, his country is doing well[he tells himself]. Biya seldom attends inauguration ceremonies for projects which his own government has been charged with undertaking, he might have to confront the embarrassing reality of how little was done with all the money which was allocated for them. Or worse still, he might show up at the site, and find out that the project was never executed at all! This would be more than his self- image could bear , it would shatter the myth of Grand Ambitions which he is convinced he is undertaking.

And in case the domestic audience doesn’t embrace this contrived image of the true Biya, Popol has retained a communications consultant named Patricia Balme to help manage his international image. She is the one who designed and launched his new website, she answers personally to the president, and is paid a multimillion dollar commission . Contrast this with the bland efforts by Cameroon’s foreign ministry to refurbish the nation’s image to foreign investors: a conference was held with many media outlets including internationally reputable ones like SOPECAM1 and CRTV.2

The unwritten decree has been issued; “Only pictures of the president taken before 1985 will be displayed in public”. The emperor cannot be allowed to confront his self image as a balding, ageing, hunched- over , octogenarian curmudgeon . A man who would procure a young woman less than half his age in an attempt to reinvigorate a lifetime of dismal underachievement. Contrast this with Mandela, a man who has no need to be pretentious, a man who is so comfortable in his own skin and in his accomplishments, he remains deliberately understated whenever he makes public appearances. Mandela wears shirts designed by Abidjan based designer , Pathe Ouedraogo.

As the position of overseer was the penultimate accomplishment for the native employee in the colonial plantation system , Biya is the modern day incarnation of that headman in the neocolonial State which is Cameroon. He can have no possibility of moving upwards in the organizational chain . His salvation and reward will only come from his masters above, and his sense of self worth emanates from his ability to keep niggers below him at bay and giving due respect to the power of the position vested in him. And although he is very much of them, he soon develops a healthy loathing for those below him, as this allows him to maintain his authority and to elicit their respect with dispassionate ruthlessness.

Biya must have no compunctions against ordering troops to shoot at university students who are demanding an affordable cost of living , at the same time , there should be no sense of irony when he publicly informs the French Cooperation Minister that Africa needs a Marshall Plan to help curb rising unemployment.

At no other point in Cameroon’s history has Biya been revealed to be more impotent –that is the perfect word – than in the days after the lake Nyos disaster. To see a man live on television , looking quizzical, disheveled and shell -shocked. Unable to comprehend the questions posed him in English by the international press , being forced to immediately confront and address the crises without the pompous scripted speeches he’s most accustomed to. Most memorably, the world had to watch his performance in contrast with that of the visiting Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres , who appeared most self-assured in front of the cameras , was fluently bilingual ; and was prepared to commandeer a relief effort into lake Nyos all the way from his home country, Israel . Biya looked bamboozled and hopelessly impotent, but most embarrassingly, everyone say it … Cameroonians need to go back and see the man whom they have as head of State.

Towards his masters, Biya sees himself as the eternally abiding underling: He described his mentor, Ahidjo, as his “illustrious predecessor”. Towards François Mitterrand , he remained “le meilleur eleve”. His hubris and contempt for his countrymen extends to other African Heads of State whom he equally regards with disdain: until recently, Biya was not on speaking terms with Omar Bongo, he rebuffed Obiang Nguemma’s efforts to secure greater influence for his country within CEMAC … even though Equatorial Guinea’s economic influence is fast dwarfing Cameroon’s tattered image.

Matthew 7:20: “A tree is measured by its fruit” the good book says. So what fruit has the New Deal bore we must ask?

Nothing threatens to unravel the travesty of the New Deal’s lies than the youth population which has come of age under the Biya regime. Biya avoids them like the plague. They must remind him of everything he is not, everything he once wanted to be. They are irrepressibly energetic, valiant, outspoken, brash, strident, intrepid and outright dangerous for a regime which is founded on lies and illusions. They threaten to untangle the illusions which most of their parents have been co-opted into believing. They insist of dreaming with their eyes open.

They begin to question if Ahidjo was all bad.

They insist that Um Nyobe and Ernest Ouandie be reinstated on the pantheon of Cameroon’s leaders. They worship Thomas Sankara and openly seek out his acolytes from their midst. They demand better education and jobs which will prepare them to compete against their peers in Taiwan and Botswana. They demand to see a project which would engage them in the development of their own country in the shortest possible time … so, Biya is afraid of them, he is very afraid of them. They are uncontrollable.

He cannot possibly meet their expectations, he does not know how. He’s never had ambitions or the wherewithal to deliver on projects of this scale. Should they succeed at forcing him to undertake such a project, he’d be committing to a timeline. But Biya doesn’t want to be held to timelines, it may take all of his natural life…and force him to confront his own finitude, his own mortality. This cannot stand.

If the illusion of progress in the New Deal government must be maintained, the youth must be railroaded into other unproductive efforts. Chinese, Indian, French and European investors will be drafted in their place. The youth must be dealt with using a very long stick. If the word ‘auto-development’ is noticeably absent from the vocabulary of Cameroonians today, it is because Biya knows that the idea of employing the youth in any such initiative would empower them considerably. They would come face to face with the fact that they have more power for effective change in the country that they would otherwise believe. They will learn that they are the agents of their progress. They are their own biggest assets. They are the future and the future is now! They are the people they’ve been waiting for!

The ruse is to put a wedge between the youth and their instinct for praxis. Their instinct to take on the challenge and make the best opportunity of it. Youthful exuberance is their biggest asset. But in the end they just might accomplish what Biya has told them all along would need more time . They will learn that they no longer have to be patient. The political fallout will be earth shattering for the Biya regime. Most dangerously, at the end of such an enterprise, Biya would not be able to claim victory from them. He would not be able to step to the podium and claim credit for the CPDM cabal. The youth would know different. The big lie would have been discredited.

So Biya must persist with the tricks which he’s mastered well so far: restricted access to the polls, voter empathy, diversion, football, beer. Etc. They must be encouraged to stay in school, even of their education will not prepare them for the real world in which jobs don’t exist. Trust the politicians to build your future, but pay no attention to what kind of future it will be, let us worry about that. But above all , stay in school! Meanwhile, Biya’s own children attend elite private school in Switzerland, and most of his collaborators have sent their children abroad at taxpayer’s expense.

In the end, men like Biya cannot afford to give Cameroon’s youth a chance at success on their own merit because it would prove the impotence of his failed agenda after twenty six in power. It is the ‘scorched-earth’ politics of the cult of personality at the core of the New Deal: If Biya cannot get credit for doing it, no-one else will.i.e. it should not get done. So Biya runs from the very nation he claims to be building, seeking refuge in Europe. He appeals to the youth to be more patriotic in making sacrifices for their fatherland, but he carries French and Chinese passports in his back pocket. On one occasion, he even addressed the youth on 11th February from his hotel room in Switzerland. It wasn’t worth his while to make the trip back to Cameroon to mark the occasion with the youth who are the future of the country, even if taxpayers were paying for the jet fuel.

In Cameroon today, there is 1.6 millions miles of road for every 1,000 people. Chances are, that statistic has remained the same or even declined since Biya became president of Cameroon. It is easy to tout such nebulous concepts as greater “openness” and “freedom of speech”. Much more difficult to defend is the number of Cameroonian children who die from malaria in 2008 compared to the number who died from that disease when Biya assumed power. Has the ratio of students per classroom improved since Biya was president? What percentage of Cameroonians have access to potable water now, compared to the rate in 1982. What percentage of our youth are functionally employable when they leave school? In truth, we may never truly be able to tally any of the good things which may have come out of the New Deal because the negative blunders seem so overwhelming.

The Habits of Ineptitude

Many of Cameroons problems are structural no doubt, but coupled with a president who is more afraid of the prospect of failure than he is animated by a desire to succeed, what we are left with is an unqualified disaster. In his end of year address, Biya appeals, once more, to all international parties for assistance with improving security along Cameroon’s coastline. Given the gravity of the situation, one would imagine that Biya would take a personal stake in seeing through any efforts beefing up security: Limbe, Kribi and Yaoundé were all targets of brazen attacks in 2008.

Once again, Biya cannot afford to put his reputation on the line and vigorously confronting the new phenomena of sea-borne bandits storming ashore to Cameroon’s major cities and holding entire populations hostage. But Biya is weary is staking any claims: his infallibility may be called to question.

And so as the year 2008 drew to a close, we saw Mr. Biya furiously backpedalling from his previous assertions that the perpetrators of attacks which killed 27 Cameroonians in and around the Bakassi region will be brought to justice and his promise that everything possible would be done so that those events would never happen again. Not surprisingly, we have come not to expect much from a man who has always fled from opportunity, closed the doors of possibility and smothered any efforts at building bridges into the future which burns brightly before us. Our youth can see this light and they have embraced it enthusiastically and they know that Biya stands in their way. Their Moses may not have emerged yet, but they certainly know who Pharaoh is.

As usual, Biya’s end of year address was delivered in his trademark coarse and hoarse which has always been marked by its lack of vitality and vigor. At every attempt to convey fervor and determinations, Biya sounds evermore shrill and labored. He sounds his age, he looks his age … he’s a man who time had come and passed by fleetingly without his knowing it. He still wants to lead, but no one wants to follow. He’s still convinced he can complete his Grand Projets as his legacy to the sub-region, but our youth want to be competing online with their peers around the globe. He imagines he is running hard and fast towards a finishing line only he can see, but he’s in fact foundering under his own weight, and knees that can no longer bear him. Mr. Biya believes he can hear the adoring crowds and the “motions de soutien” coming from all corners of the land, no one dares tell him that the stadium lights are turned off, the crowds have long left the stadium, and his people have long moved on.

I’ll be in touch.

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