By Christopher Ambe Shu
As the November Session of Cameroon National Assembly wraps up Saturday Decmber5,after the adoption of the 2010 Budget which stands at Fcfa 2,570 bllion ,and other bills, the past three days have been dramatic as other MP's including those of the ruling CPDM courageously joined the usually outspoken MP for Akwaya,Hon Ayah Paul Abine ,to protest against the "Undemcratic and illegal " adoption of bills .
It all started in the afternoon of December 2nd when Hon Ayah Paul Abine,took to the rostrum and said that, a few months before,Catholic Christians in Douala had taken to task the National Assembly for authorizing the President of the Republic to ratify the Maputo Protocol with alleged sinful provisions.
Hon Ayah added that his concern was not with the veracity of what the Christians alleged about the content of the protocol, but with the fact that Parliament often authorizes the President of the Republic to ratify international instruments that Parliamentarians have not as much as seen, and that it was contrary to the relevant constitutional provisions.
The Member of Parliament for Akwaya then said that he would have nothing to do with the five Bills he was holding if the relevant instruments to be ratified were not made available to him for prior studies.
Otherwise, he insisted, it should be recorded that he did not vote the five Bills purporting to authorize the President of the Republic to ratify the instruments.
The presiding Vice President of the National Assembly, Hon Baoro Theophile, ordered that the relevant instruments be made available to Hon Ayah.But the rest of Members of Parliament shouted that the instruments should be made available to all of them and not just to some.
Even though the instruments were not given to Hon Ayah, as he told the press later, the Vice President declared adopted the three Bills without a vote, implying thereby that Hon Ayah was one with the rest.
When the remaining two of the five Bills came up for debate in the afternoon of December 3, all the Members of Parliament who took to the rostrum, the bulk of whom were of the ruling CPDM party, opposed the adoption of the Bill relative to fresh accords between Cameroon and France.
As Hon. Ayah was raising a preliminary objection on the procedure the Vice President had followed the day before, declaring adopted the Bills of the day without a vote, the Vice President began to interrupt him. But Hon Ayah, with the support of most of the other
Members of Parliament present, successfully insisted on making his point. He ended up moving that the Bill being debated -be put to the vote at the end of the debates in accordance with the Standing Orders of the House.
When the Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization finished answering questions from the Members of Parliament, several deputies requested to take to the rostrum for a second round of debate.
In the face of overwhelming evidence that the Parliament of Cameroon was on the verge of making history by exceptionally rejecting a Bill tabled by the Government, the Vice President, Hon Baoro Theophile, not only refused to allow the parliamentarians to continue with debates, but he went straight on to declare the Bill adopted without putting it to the vote. The move provoked shouts of disapprobation from the parliamentarians who began to leave the hemicycle in disorder.
Contacted, Hon Ayah said that, up to the moment of contacting him, the five instruments the President of the Republic was authorized to ratify had not been given to him, or to other Members of Parliament. He added that so had been the system all along, but it would appear some parliamentarians no longer want to give any such blank check.
Hon Ayah concluded that the Vice President’s undemocratic conduct and the lawless “adoption” of the Bills conclusively confirm his repeated assertion that Cameroon’s Parliament is not more than a “formality institution”.
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