25 YEARS OF BIYA'S PEACE & STABILITY -- AN EDITORIAL

From Rigour & Moralization to Greater Achievements

It is a little expressed fact that the nation Mr. Paul Biya took an oath to defend on November 6, 1982, the United Republic of Cameroon, is no more - vitiated by the stroke of Mr. Biya's pen in 1984. Today, he presides over a country called the Republic of Cameroun, or to be linguistically and politically correct, la République du Cameroun. But this is a detail of history we'll ignore as Biya, the New Dealer of 1982 and his adherents celebrate a quarter century of great achievements.

It will be too much to list all the achievements of this regime, from the brutal slashing of public service salaries to the gangster-like like taxation of the population, but two keystone achievements of the Biya regime must be highlighted.

Biya's so-called New Deal policy, with its cornerstone of rigour and moralization propelled his country to the gold medal for the most corrupt country of earth. Under his watch, it also became a furious Olympian quest to attain the glorified status of a "Poor and Heavily Indebted Country," a success that was hilariously celebrated in Yaoundé in Mr. Biya's race to the bottom.

After a quarter of a century of routine lengthy and opulent presidential sojourns abroad, after years of all talk and little positive action, and a now docile political opposition and populace content to wait for nature to rid them of Mr. Biya's reign, the President has grown into his best when he addresses not the aspirations and interests of his countrymen, but those he believes he owes his position and status to: the white man, his target audience these days. The colonial power, France, to whom he owes his position in an arrangement made vivid a few years ago by the testimony of one Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the convicted former President of the French Oil Company, ELF. Mr. Floch-Prigent essentially allowed that without the support of ELF, Biya would no longer be President. As for the Americans and their other European cousins, the message is the same: the New Dealers are the exclusive guarantors of Mr. Biya's vaunted peace and stability in a land of economic opportunities.

In his relentless quest to please his target audience, the ritual of elections a la New Deal is accompanied not by Mr. Biya suffering for the suffrage of the local population in their dusty locales with no or intermittent supply of water and electricity, but by attempts to bamboozle the white man in far off capitals. So the New Dealer spends millions of CFA francs buying adverts in foreign publications like Le Figaro and The New York Times, and paying assorted Public Relations experts to promote his image and strange concept of peace and stability a la Camerounaise . The peace and stability only he can secure presumably for the economic opportunity and benefit, not for his citizens, but for those who would read Le Figaro and The New York Times .

This narrative and facade of peace and stability must be maintained at the cost of the masses whose cyclical slaughter by the armed forces goes on with absolute impunity and the indifference of Mr. Biya's foreign collaborators. And so year after year, the Negroes are slaughtered in Bepanda, Buea, Yaoundé, Douala, Abong Mbang and Bamenda in the name of peace and stability. The facade must continue for the interest of those who come with images of peace, stability and economic opportunity gleaned from glossy paid adverts in Le Figaro and The New York Times .

Thankfully, the reality of twenty-five years of Biya's reign however dispels all the smoke and mirrors of paid adverts and high-priced Public Relations campaigns. In April of this year, a cable subjected: " Cameroon: Asylum Adjudication Challenges " from the American Embassy in Yaoundé stated that "Cameroon consistently ranks as one of the world's most corrupt countries. As such, almost everything is for sale, including membership cards in 'outlawed' organizations, newspapers articles, letters from non-licensed individuals claiming to be medical authorities attesting to medical treatments ... supposed prisoners in jail cells with actual police officers present ...The Embassy has seen direct evidence of all these self-serving activities and believes that the vast majority of asylum claims by Cameroonians are fraudulent." For a country that Mr. Biya pays enormous amount of the peoples money to celebrate as being peaceful and stable, we agree with the American Embassy in her assessment of "the stunning result that Cameroon continues to rank among the top sources of asylum claims, in league with China and Colombia, while dramatically outstripping Sudan, Venezuela, Pakistan and dwarfing the figures from other countries with far worse human right records and much larger populations" after twenty-five years of Mr. Biya's reign.

From rigour and moralisation through peace and stability to the latest bromide of "greater achievements," our circumstance, given the rate at which our citizens have opted to escape the land of "peace" and "stability," spells a hardship apparently exceeding those of even African countries at war. The citizens of the land of Mr. Biya's twenty-five years of peace and stability have given up and are leaving, but for those who would stay behind, let this be the last time any one individual celebrates twenty-five years in power.