By Ayah Paul Abine
The talk about Cameroon being transformed into a huge construction site in the near future revived in me my foolish conviction that the Pauls start off badly only to end up successful almost invariably. But that conviction was doused by the nearly incontrovertible fact that the original Paul was short in stature. That was corroborated by the fact that there was conversion from Saul to Paul and not in reversal. My source is the Catholic doctrine of the early sixties dispensed to green virgin brains at St John’s R.C.M. School, Akwaya, by devoted and dedicated vocational teachers.
A fortnight since the imbroglio and time seems to give proof to my reservation. Already are apparently disillusioned many who had interpreted “ensemble” as meaning that it was over the age when one person headed every State organ to the point where a Cameroonian to whom a child was born even in the remotest village had to wait to be told by Yaounde what the child’s sex was. At the command post of reasoning now seems to be seated the paradox of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem only for the very euphoric crowds to cry out “Crucify him!” just a few days later.
To illustrate the point, let’s take for analogy our National Assembly – the weakest of the three arms of government. Not too many honest Cameroonians would seek to contradict the obvious that that institution is more of a formality façade that conceals a stinking lethal mess; and that its members, like maggots, feed without interval for fattening. Their dessert is their peremptory watering of the fig tree for its fruits with spiteful emptiness for mother earth.
It is horrifying and utterly demoralizing that even at this crucial moment when Cameroonians are expectant that their parliamentarians may avail themselves of the promise for a better future to debate and enact good laws, the story is rather more sycophantic subservience. Who wants to argue to the contrary? Is not it true that only the super-intelligent honourable parliamentarians of Cameroon that can receive some afternoon a twenty-eight-article Bill such as the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption and proceed to debate it the very next day at 11 AM even without having read it? Tel me where else in the globe a 103-sections Bill on electricity with a four-page annex can be tabled at 4 PM and debated the next day at 11 AM. Verily I say unto you, brethren: our parliamentarians are omniscient!
Yet do I feel fully justified to fulminate against our being fourteen days from the end of the budgetary session of Parliament without being tabled the finance Bill that will transform Cameroon into a “chantier de construction” next January, (some 45 days away). Even stronger, to my chagrin, is my fulmination against our parliamentarians’ complacency and facetiousness - “bon enfants”. As the people’s representatives, one should have liked to think that the general interest should take precedence over manoeuvring for ministerial posts! It seems to me idle to invoke the Constitutional provision that, upon election, one becomes a parliamentarian of the nation with, seemingly, no allegiance to the electorate!
But shut up! Who are you to interpret the Constitution to “honourable” parliamentarians? You are warned! In reciprocity then do I compliantly entreat: let no-one ask me whether the term “nation” as used in the Constitution is in the abstract. You are forewarned!
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