Cameroon’s socio-political drama: Who says it is all over?

By Mofor Samuel

Cameroon is a country endowed with enormous natural resources, brimming with milk and honey. Yet years of neglect and bearing the brunt of oil exploitation has left the common man at the bottom of Cameroon’s development league. Cameroonians are faced with the Herculean task of rewriting the history of a wealthy people savagely impoverished by state tyranny and the greed of their multinational collaborators. Cameroon urgently needs a leader to serve as the right spearhead for the campaign to bring a new era of freedom to the people and relieve them from want, undue marginalization, and injustice as well as freedom from repeated assault on their collective dignity. The palpable lack of development, reflected in all sub-sectors of the country’s economy is unsettling.

There is that great need therefore of a sense of duty for Cameroonians to start looking for someone they trust and believe in to give leadership in their battle to pull down all impediments to justice, as well as rally their resources against forces and agents that enthroned social injustice and inequity as fundamental principle of state policy.

Cameroonians are a patient lot. Furthermore, the struggle of the man on the street is to get the next meal on the table. Cameroonians nowadays are digging deep in their pockets to be able to buy basic necessities. The economy is far from out of the woods. The people yearn for a better deal. The university lecturer, civil servant, council workers and others who toil endlessly the economic wheels of the country turning but who have not receive pay commensurate to their efforts, recount tales of woe.

The latest upsurge of violence in Cameroon which erupted during the last week of February 2008 might have been stirred up by regime insiders. Biya’s government is now more than ever before expected to deliver the people from poverty and deprivation. He and his new team of ministers are faced with a gargantuan task. Concentrating on the problems that are besetting ordinary people’s daily lives would be more convincing. The government must be seen to be making a clean break from the past. Money and more precisely its management should not be a problem. Stories about fraud and corruption continue to litter pages of newspapers and magazines. Politics and money become deadly mix when the political machine is regarded as the means through which one can get one’s hands on some of the country’s money as is the case in Cameroon. It will take strong leadership to introduce a cleaner political culture.

Even the current fashionable combination of HIPC and pro-poor policies has not brought about improvements. In the absence of effective audit systems, an active parliament, proper legislation and planning systems, debt relief is a curse rather than a blessing, to quote one great scholar. It increases corruption, not reduces it. Corruption has been seen as the bane of Cameroon. If it is rooted out, the country could, probably survive without aid.

It is up to the government to get serious about the country’s many unsolved problems- poverty, no job prospects, too little educational and professional training or none at all. For many young men, to get a job is impossible and this makes them to get frustrated. Frustrated youngsters are easy prey for calls to violence and they may be again if nothing is done. Tensions continue to exist. The spectre of destabilization has already come from them and it could still come again.

For the time being, security operatives armed to the teeth are still patrolling the streets, positioned at strategic junctions or guarding certain public facilities. But then what will happen when they eventually leave? Citizens already walk the streets with the fear of intimidation, harassment or undue molestation by security agents. There are more indiscriminate arrests and detention without trial.

Democracy is supposed to equal improved welfare, the absence of dictatorship and the presence of equal rights. Democracy is not all about the rule of law, or the presence of peace in society, but more about how government responds to the basic problems to guarantee peace in the stomach. The prevailing opinion is that government at all levels has not done enough to improve the quality of life of the people.

Not many of the continent’s leaders appreciate the need for change and they believe in the supremacy of their reasoning. They tend to have their own vision of reality. Hence, the contradiction between what African leaders promise their people and what they actually do. Any wonder then that Paul Biya has a mountain of burden to contend with. A few months back, his party and his cronies announced their intention to seek an amendment to the constitution; to smoothen the road for ruling beyond 2011. This seems to be a dress rehearsal for the political atmosphere one can expect during the 2011presidential election.

Biya’s position which is art variance with the provisions of the constitution could only be explained by the need to pave the way for his safe passage to Etoudi.

With Paul Biya still harbouring the intention to run again in the race for the presidency, he is mobilizing quietly those he knows can be relied on to deliver his mandate in parliament and at the grassroots. It is a game of one good turn deserving another. CPDM had an absolute majority in parliament thanks to his total backing of the rigging machinery put in place during the twin elections.

Has Biya’s government learnt that foreign donors will no longer automatically finance the financial holes it created through corruption? Will the people be delivered from misery and frustration; and thus lose the impetus for another round of violence? Difficult to say giving that, it seems as if the population has been overwhelmed by the sit-tight mentality of those in authority, most of who pay more attention to feathering their own nests than to priority issues that affect the welfare of those they lead. The time has come for the dignity of the oppressed people to be restored, and by extension, the rights of Cameroonians to carry their destiny in their own hands by controlling the natural endowments in their country.
Even though the recent social unrest showed few signs of seriously threatening the regime’s control, other stresses within the country could encourage some in the hierarchy to continue the “war”. Who says it is all over?