By
Christopher Ambe
The name Ayah Paul Abine ,in Cameroon in particular
and the world in general, is mostly known to revolve around the law: he has
been a prosecutor, judge, lawmaker and today he is a barrister.
In fact, Ayah Paul Abine, now
aged 68, also means different things to different people:he is a rights activist, traditional ruler, politician
(party leader), dissent, philanthropist, social critic, a caring husband and
father.
It was last November 21 in
Buea during a court ceremony that this grey-haired legal luminary, several
months after his retirement at the age of 67 as Deputy Advocate-General (or
Deputy Attorney-General) at Cameroon’s Supreme Court, that he was sworn-in as a
lawyer. Retired, but not at all tired!
In his decades of judicial practice, one of
the things that disturbed this legal luminary was/is the fact that the judiciary
in Cameroon is not independent as it obtains in advanced democracies. But he distinguished
himself and emerged as a magistrate of exceptional class.
Legally speaking, Justice Ayah
Paul strongly believes in (and has applied) the principle that “a judge is
supposed to be guided by the law and his conscience” in deciding on cases, and also
the principle that “Justice must not only be done but seen done!”
Conscious that as a judge
the public too judges your objectivity and impartiality in the dispensation of
justice, Justice Ayah Paul’s judgments, legal analysts have admitted, were,
more often than not, outstanding.
In so doing, Justice Ayah Paul attracted
public accolade but unknowingly stepped on some hierarchical toes that would
want things done their way. As such, Ayah received what some pundits have described as various forms of torture, which
only emboldened him and made him more outspoken in his efforts to right wrongs.
“The law is the law and
even the President of the Republic is not above the law,” he likes to say.
Credited for his high sense of objectivity in adjudication,
and after serving as a no-nonsense law maker for a decade, many had hoped
Hon.Justice Ayah would be appointed a judge at the Supreme Court of Cameroon,
but he was rather appointed Deputy Advocate-General (prosecutor) at same court.
“In the Cameroonian
system, you can be on the bench this year and next year you go to the Legal
Department. Or, you are in the Legal Department and the next time you are on
the bench,” Justice Ayah Paul had told this journalist in an interview in 2015,
in reaction to his appointment as Deputy Advocate-General.
But he had insisted: “The
point is that wherever you are, you do justice. So, wherever I am I would
render justice to everybody without fear or favor. The public can count on me.”
While still serving as
Deputy Attorney-General at the Supreme Court of Cameroon, Hon.Justice Ayah was
on January 21, 2017 “illegally arrested and jailed without charge” for eight
months in Yaounde.” He was only released from detention, along other Anglophone
rights activists such as Barrister Felix Agbor Nkongho, by a presidential
pardon on August 30, 2017.
In December 2014,
Hon.Justice Ayah, who had served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Akwaya for
eleven years, became so involved in rights advocacy that members of the (now
outlawed) Southern Cameroons National
Council (SCNC) elected him in absentia as National Chairman of the liberation organization,
which was created in 1994 to ensure the restoration of independence of British Southern
Cameroons.
But Hon. Justice Ayah, although a noted
minority rights crusader, turned down his election on grounds that he was not
yet a registered member of SCNC, which at the time was in fractions.
Hon.Justice Ayah, as
required by law, was supposed to have been re-integrated into the Ministry of Justice
as a career magistrate as soon as his two-term parliamentary mandate ended in
September 2013.
In the National Assembly,
he had resigned as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee to the embarrassment
of the ruling party, on whose platform he entered Parliament in 2002.
Hon. Justice Ayah would later
be the lone CPDM MP who sharply and openly criticized a 2008 constitutional
amendment that removed presidential term limit, which if maintained would have barred President Paul Biya from
standing for re-election in 2011.
This jurist-turned law
maker later resigned from the ruling CPDM, convinced that he being “gagged”
from effecting positive people-and development-oriented changes within the
party, for national interest.
In the National Assembly Hon.
Justice Ayah was reportedly considered within
government circles a thorn in the flesh
of the Biya government; but this fearless elite of Akwaya subdivision who loves
and speaks the “bitter truth” to power, always argued, and strongly too, that
he was working for the interest of the nation, and not for individuals.
It would be recalled that before Justice Ayah Paul
became an MP, he was Vice-President of the Southwest Court of Appeal in Buea.
But even before occupying
that position, he had served as President of High Court and Court of First
Instance (Magistrate’s Court) in different localities for a total of eighteen (18)
years: he was President of Ndian High Court for five years; President of Kumba
High Court for two years; he was president of Nkambe Court of First Instance
for two years, President of Wum Court of First Instance for two years and
President of Buea Court of First Instance for seven years.
After his parliamentary mandate, Hon.Justice Ayah
requested to be re-absorbed into the Ministry of Justice. But for unexplained
reasons, he waited for fifteen months-and without a salary, during which time
he busied himself, among other things, doing rights advocacy.
But as the SCNC was still pleading
with him to accept his election as their chairman, President Biya,
coincidentally(some say strategically),signed a decree re-absorbing Hon.Justice
Ayah into in the Ministry of Justice with his promotion as Deputy
Advocate-General at the Supreme Court.
That did not, in any way,
stop Hon.Justice Ayah from writing and educating the public on legal issues and
minority rights, especially as he was not only Deputy-Advocate-General at the
Supreme Court, but also remained the National President of the political party,
Popular Action Party (PAP), whose
candidate occupied the fifth position at the 2011 Cameroon’s presidential election.
(Justice Ayah himself was the presidential candidate).
With the eruption of the
Anglophone crisis in October 2016 over Anglophone minority rights issues, Hon.Justice
Ayah, still sitting as Deputy Advocate-General, would be arrested and dumped in
detention without being formally charged-a move, which, pundits think,
contributed in radicalizing minority rights activists, fighting for the
independence of English-speakers in Cameroon.
But political pundits
thought that Hon.Justice Ayah’s support for and outspokenness on minority
rights, helped fuel rights protests by Anglophones, who make up 20% of Cameroon’s
population of about 24 million.
Hon.Justice Ayah who put
at least 27 years in the judiciary with twenty(20) as magistrate and seven as
prosecutor, and eleven as MP before retirement from the Civil Service of
Cameroon, has just started a new career as a Lawyer/Barrister, a profession
with greater solidarity.
While in detention as
Deputy Advocate-General for eight months only one magistrate reportedly braved
the odds to visit Hon Justice Ayah, leaving many to question whether
professional solidarity was not cherished by magistrates and or prosecutors.
Ayah Paul ‘s career started upon his graduation,
with flying colors, from the National School of Administration and Magistracy
(ENAM) in Yaoundé in 1976.
Many critical observers
think that Ayah Paul’s eloquence and mastery of the laws of the land will make him excel in his new career as a barrister.
We pay homage to over 85 students of the University of Buea and several other innocent civilians on and off campus who on 28 November 2018 were tortured by state security officers (police and gendarmerie) as a result of a protest within the main university campus in Buea, South West Region (Cameroon).
