(And the thousand Njawes to bloom!)
Dear Pius,
I thought I would just keep quiet, and silently mark your passing with my tears flowing inwards. But as the days go by, utterances by politicians, rumour mongers, friends and foes have pushed me to make my weeping visible through this last letter to you.
Needless to say that the news of your demise shook me to my foundation, and left me dumbfounded, asking the stupid question – why? Of course, the One and only who decided that your day had come may retort with a "why not?", but that will not easily erase the haunting question from my grieving mind.
You will remember that this is the second time I am writing a letter to you. The first was when you were released from New Bell prison through a presidential pardon. I wrote then to congratulate you for walking defiantly out of prison – without thanking your supposed pardoner. You knew very well that he did not pardon you because he wanted to, but because of the weight of national and international opinion that protested against the injustice of your imprisonment.
A president the citizens have empowered, and over whom they should retain sovereignty should not set limits beyond which he cannot be talked about or criticized. This is why you fought so hard to ensure that criticism of the president, the government, and public officials was always robust and unlimited. Your defiant attitude was different from that of Yondo Black, Bebbey Eyidi, André Marie Mbida, Charles Okala, and others that suffered the same injustice like you, but chose to give thanks and apologies following their release!
Some people usually say that journalists and politicians should always sit on opposite sides of the table, not on the same side. This is why some naive politicians have been asking what you were doing in Washington, hobnobbing with politicians. I know that if you returned alive and met such people, you would have told them that you left your side of the table to share the same side with politicians because you were interested in politics – which serious journalist is not? Further, like all good journalists, you wanted to be where the action was. More importantly, you were trying to do what many of our so-called politicians have failed woefully to do – furnish the glue to hold people together, and the imagination around which people can mobilize for 2011.
Since you have been using Le Messager Newspaper to diagnose our society’s ills, you had developed a wider curiosity, and wanted to lead in integrative thinking that has escaped the same politicians that were questioning your purpose and intentions.
You know that some of the invited politicians did not make it to Washington, claiming that their past experiences in "coalitions" were a deterrent, or that they have different strategies; others are even saying that the struggle for change should be inside, not outside the country! Again, I know that if you had the opportunity to meet them, you would have reminded them that the past is just prologue, not a forecast. You would have reminded them that change is too complicated, too multifaceted – too human – to be arranged in linear logic from cause to effect.
Such "politicians" may not know that the seed of change is in all of us; and that for the seed to sprout, it needs just a change of attitude by those who have failed us before; just the casting away of their selfish attitudes; just their coming together to make something different, something that has not happened before, happen.
I know that you would have told them that like you, a leader should always maintain a lively intellectual curiosity, and an interest in everything. After all, it is said that everything is related to everything else, including what they call their different strategies, and their past experiences. You would have advised them to always maintain a genuine interest in what other "leaders" think, and why they think the way they think. I know that you would have done all this because the type of future you thought about is neither a straight line projection of the past, nor the present. You knew that there can be a better outcome than would be got by adding up past experiences...
You were always an uncompromising purveyor of the truth. You always stood up to power with rare courage and integrity. Through the daily information you carried in Le Messager, you tried to help us to make sense of the torrent of information released on us by the present communication revolution. In the process, at the detriment of your freedom, your radio project and many others, you exposed wrongdoing in our society, causing our reluctant public officials to avoid certain actions due to the fear that you would hold the actions up to public scrutiny. You were good at whipping up public outrage, and directing it at wrongdoing in the private and public spheres. See where your sudden disappearance has left us!
Well, I know that you were more a teacher than a journalist. Therefore I trust that your passing will cause the thousand Njawes that you trained to bloom. Only then shall we realize that, indeed, every cloud has a silver lining!
Go well, Brother!
Tazoacha Asonganyi
Yaounde.
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