BUFFOONERY

By AYAH Paul ABINE
When we wondered whether Cameroonians are of unsound mind or of average intelligence, some self-proclaimed omniscient lord was quick to condemn us। But our query was more a matter of deduction from patterned grotesque buffoonery than from solecism.

Cameroonians may bury their heads in the national triangle and, like the ostrich, imagine that we have concealed our ignorance and social filth from the world.

But the difference is telling when we find ourselves on the lowest rungs of the ladder in international organizations while Senegalese, Malians, Ivorians, Chadians etc are issuing instructions to us from above; in sharp contrast to the fact that we were the first bilingual country in the world.

Nor can we pretend that we are honoured when at international airports Cameroonians with diplomatic passports are sorted out of the queues and ordered to take off their coats, shoes and even socks on the ground of mistrust. No rational man would deny that honesty and integrity pay after all.

The true Cameroonian therefore would be the one that raises questions about our national integrity; and on why we have failed or are unable to capitalize even on our bilingualism.

Who can deny that our celebrated pride on the international arena today is predicated on multi-faceted corruption which we have institutionalized as our sparkling national apparel? Or that corruption now spices all aspects of our national life so much so that we are reduced to automatons or offspring of intellectual inertia by official distortion of the natural and the real?

We should not pretend we do not know that to qualify as corruption, money must not necessarily change hands; and that this fact does not admit of disputation. Undoubtedly, refusal to be real before the obvious and procuring another so to be for tangible or intangible consideration amounts to corruption.

Let us illustrate the point we are struggling to make with the current wave of “motions (motions?) of support” calling on the national chairman of CPDM to contest the 2011 presidential election as the party’s candidate.

No honest member of the party with unimpaired reasoning faculty is unaware that the party’s constitution provides unambiguously that the national chairman of the party is automatically the presidential candidate. As it is not in doubt that our party has an uncontested current national chairman, that person is logically the presidential candidate for 2011. Calling on him to stand the 2011 election is as superfluous as preposterous. Such absurdity smacks of false pretences, and is colossal buffoonery.

Even if the persons calling on him to stand had information that the current national chairman wanted to stand down as the chairman of the party, the answer would not be clamouring in the news media for him to stand as a candidate.

We would be bound to follow the party’s constitutional process which requires the holding of an extra-ordinary congress in the circumstance for the purpose of maintaining the person in the position of our national chairman. Upon his accepting his being maintained in that position, he would automatically be the party’s candidate in the upcoming presidential election as per the party’s constitution.

The whole exercise would be an in-house party affair and not an occasion for media and public manipulations. The current clamouring in the news media is even at variance with the very chairman’s recent caution that important decisions are not taken in the streets, or by the news media. Those calls, to say the least, could well not be less than ambitious designs behind a façade of disinterest.

One is at liberty to opine also that those superfluous calls are from people of bad faith. It is not illogical then to deduce that the calls are ridiculously provocative of the current national chairman. It is like telling the world that our chairman is uninformed about his constitutional right; therefore are those persons getting him informed.

And it is all the more ridiculous when one puts things in the context of the call by the so-called elite of the Centre Region. We all know that the Central Committee is the live wire of our party. It is the supreme organ that directs the day to day functioning of the party, and ensures conformity with the party’s constitution by the party’s organs. If the Secretary General of that supreme organ went along with the others to contradict the Constitution of CPDM by resorting to such pejorative political claptraps, one can only feel vindicated in questioning the intellectual integrity of Cameroonians and their good faith.

The English wisely use the word “head” aptly to depict positions. Common examples are “head of the Commonwealth, head of department, village-head”…Their first reason for choosing that term, I would imagine, is that the reasoning faculty is in the head. So too are thought and conception. Above all, four of the five senses are in the head. The head logically is eighty percent of the human being or grouping.

Any malfunctioning of the head can only mean total derangement below. When one is the head, therefore, so much is expected from one that level-headedness must be one’s mightiest weapon. That helps the person to attenuate the pangs of irrationalities and illogicalities in the body of which he is the head.

As the Cameroonian’s conduct most often begets oddities and absurdities, we feel justified to raise questions about his intellectual integrity, with little intention to hurt.