ARTIF ICIAL CAMEROONIANS

BY AYAH Paul ABINE

Despite our shabby depiction by the International community, Cameroonians have remained glued to artificial respectability। Many there are who are attired in perforated garments of the Opposition only as a springboard to bargaining for positions that are of no higher value than the sewage waste। Difficult to comprehend that a Cameroonian intellectual would play the dunce before a mere five-hundred-franc note. Or that the unemployed, masked with artificial joy, would chant hosanna, hailing misery at sweltering noon in consideration of the opium in a small bottle of Guinness. What a contradiction abusive of the intellect!

Love of country should be priceless। Such love does repel betrayal. And it shuns the bartering of the truth for the inexpensive acquisition of vanities. Otherwise, values and ethics become interred for temperamental attitudes to thrive. The result is that internal decay matures into universal surrender to cupidity with the loss of sovereignty as the irreversible fatality.
That is the foundation of our apprehension। For, to our mind, it is unimaginable that some Cameroonians would up to now pretend that anticipated presidential election in our country is a possibility. If the argument of course is that our constitution is no longer in force, we have no quarrel with it. If the argument is that law is made by man and so man can ignore it as it was once adumbrated by some tough Cameroonian, then so be it. But if, as it is apparent, some news media are nurturing such gargantuan violation of our constitution for pecuniary advantage, then so much the worse for the fatherland. More than once have men of the “fourth estate” declared that “the sun shines above and on earth journalists”. Is that imagery consistent today with journalists’ notorious inconsistencies that liken them to quicksilver?

We beg to state just one more time that there can be NO anticipated presidential election in Cameroon as per the 1996 constitutional revision, except in three specific instances। Limiting the occasions of anticipated presidential election to just those three situations was certainly intended to prevent a sitting president from taking advantage of his incumbency to organize election by ambush to the detriment of other candidates. There can be no better judgment or greater equity than that!

The first of the three instances is where the president dies in office। Another is where he reigns. The final case is where the Constitutional Council ascertains that the sitting president is incapacitated to the point that he is unable to conduct State affairs as president. In every such situation, the President of the Senate (National Assembly as of now) takes the chair and organizes anticipated presidential election within 120 days of the event taking place. Outside those three cases, there is, we repeat, no other constitutional allowance for organizing anticipated presidential election in the Cameroon of today.

Unlike anticipated election, delayed presidential election is completely ruled out। The intention of the legislature here again was surely to prevent some smart sitting president from putting off election in order to hang on to power. Reading the present Cameroon’s Constitution literally, one can reasonably contend that even a state of war cannot be invoked to delay presidential election. Only the impracticability to organize such election in the circumstance would, in Equity alone, justify delay.

From the foregoing, a reasonable man would hold that the repeated insinuations by the news media about anticipated presidential election in Cameroon in 2010 is suggestive of some Cameroonians being influenced to start preparing the minds of their fellow-countrymen for another massacre of our constitution। Ordinarily, no one can pretend that he is unaware that the constitutional provision on the point is clear and unambiguous.

Cameroonians may wish not to forget that God so loves us that he has given us a territory with huge endowments. No one Cameroonian should arrogate to himself the right to toy with that gift which our loving father has given to all his children in equal shares.