By AYAH Paul ABINE
President Paul Biya, the national chairman of our party, the CPDM, said fairly recently that issues of great moment are not settled in the street. Some of his overzealous lieutenants seemingly failed to comprehend or to retain that caution. It logically behoves the committed and loyal members of the party to inform those lieutenants that legal proceedings, by analogy, are not determined by town-criers. They are within the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts. Interfering with legal proceedings by anyone of whatever eminence, even by mere undue comments likely to influence judicial process, amounts to the criminal offence of contempt of court. The current trial of some Cameroonians for alleged such comments in respect pf the Albatros affair ought to be a lesson for everyone who reasons.
Curious therefore is the present invasion of the Cameroonian media by some CPDM barons declaring not guilty our party’s national chairman said to be standing trial before a French court. One is not saying that the presumption of innocence enshrined in our Constitution and in several international instruments is not applicable to the accused here. Far from it! That presumption is of universal application without distinction.
But it is customary that it is the accused who “denies any wrongdoing” either formally before the court in a plea of “not guilty”, or informally outside the court, occasionally to the press. Where the accused feels that he lacks the ability to defend himself, he briefs a lawyer. Even then, the lawyer does his job before the relevant court and hardly on the media.
What those persons who have purportedly supplanted the French court are doing gravely soils the image of Cameroon before the international community in that their conduct is seen either as the display of ignorance by persons in high places in Cameroon, or a demonstration of anarchical arrogance.
One would have liked to think that suing the President of the Republic is but wholly consistent with the legal provision that all men are equal before the law. Nor does it depart from the very President’s recent declaration that Cameroon is in a state of law. In a state of law, wrongdoings and/or differences between citizens are determined by courts of law and not by emotional outpourings and/or the manipulation of public opinion with vacant veracity. Being quick to assert that those who have had recourse to legal process intend to destabilize Cameroon is a dangerous instance of such manipulation. Few persons in their right senses would claim that legal process destabilizes. On the contrary, conspiratorial silence does as much as sycophantic connivance or the self-serving encouragement of wrongdoing real, feared or presumed.
Those overzealous defenders of the instant accused who have purportedly supplanted the French court have only finally drawn the attention of the international community to the undermining of Cameroon’s judiciary by some unpatriotic Cameroonians in positions of authority. No exaggeration it is to state authoritatively that our domestic law courts are virtually irrelevant today. Whoever has watched “Blood In My Hands” on Equinox Television would be one with the writer without fail on that point. And who is that Cameroonian that would dispute that a week hardly goes by without the lynching of some Cameroonian just because someone has objectively or subjectively accused him of even just attempting to steal, maybe only necessaries?
The loss of faith in the domestic courts has been orchestrated by the creation of courts in closets where the celebrated legal right to a public hearing before a court of competent jurisdiction has ceased to hold sway. As a matter of fact, there are so many quasi courts in Cameroon today that the mainstream courts are more of observers. Let us attempt here to substantiate that assertion with a cursory look at just one area.
It is no news in today’s Cameroon when the media announce that some worker of the Ministry of Trade has seized tons of cement, rice, domestic gas and the like from a trader and sold by public auction. Not only is such distress done without any legal process whatsoever, but the auction sales are done behind the law and necessarily without proper accountability. The allegation usually has been that the trader was hording the goods, or that he was selling at prices higher than authorized in our “free economy”.
But the Constitution of Cameroon provides clearly that “every person (is entitled) to a fair hearing before the courts”. Only in Cameroon would anyone imagine, let alone argue, that a civil servant in the Ministry of Trade is a court; much less that he has the authority to convict a citizen without “a fair hearing”, and to proceed to enforce his own “judgment”. The truth about our country though is that constitutional provisions outside those on presidential powers and prerogatives can be amended by a mere order of a minister, or even his subordinate at the local level.
And what helps to perpetuate the situation is that the cowardly Cameroonian offers no resistance to those illegalities. Compassion still must we have for the helpless citizen! He knows only too well that going to court would eventually be more costly in that the courts would compliantly throw out the case with costs. The filing fee, the brief, costs and vengeful punitive taxes would cripple the poor trader much more. He therefore has no choice but to endure the plunder in awful silence.
Accustomed to such institutionalized interference with process before the domestic courts, those CPDM lieutenants have instinctively felt they could similarly mount pressure on the French court. But they have only ended up damaging our country’s image beyond repairs, oblivious of one important consequence. Only a powerful, independent judiciary allays the fears of the international business community; and that’s what attracts investors. Such thoughtless open interference with justice even on the international scene can only be ruinous to our abstract programmes to attract foreign investment. And so much the worse for Cameroon!
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