In an exclusive, broad and deep interview, Hon. Joshua Osih Nambangi, National Chairman of the SDF reveals that the party is leaving no stone unturned to liberate Cameroon in 2025, from a 64-year failed system. Lighting up his recent nation-wide tour, Osih holds that the SDF is offering Cameroonians a golden opportunity of a political change. Opening up on the SDF’s position concerning coalitions, and political transitions, he regrets that about 11 million Cameroonians are stateless. It is an exciting and must-read chat conducted by The SUN Newspaper’s CEO, Wasso Norbert Binde and transcribed by the Editor, Noela E. BISONG. Read!
Thank you, Hon. Joshua Osih, National Chairman of the Social Democratic Front, for granting this exclusive interview to The SUN Newspaper just a day after your 34th anniversary. This is the first anniversary holding after the death of your Founder and Chairman, Ni John Fru Ndi. What is the spirit in you during this 34th anniversary?
Well, it is that of mixed feelings. First of all, as you observed, it is the first anniversary without our legendary pioneer chairman Ni John Fru Ndi, may his soul rest in peace.
We had a lot of challenges and thanks to the hard work that was put in by all party members, we had a successful convention, we moved out of that convention successfully and we have had a number of National Executive Committee NEC meetings that have paved the way. NEC members realised at one point that probably NEC was moving faster than the structures on the field and so a nation-wide tour was initiated, not only to meet our structures or the executives of our structures on the field but also to meet Cameroonians of all fields of life and to listen to them to better position the party for tomorrow. This was a very successful exercise because we had to tell the officials in our various structures that the party is from the base upwards and not from the top downwards and that they need to adapt to that reality because I think what happened in the past 33 years is that gradually, the base believed that everything is done at the level of the NEC and they just have to execute what they ask them to do. I had to tell them that NEC is waiting for instructions that come from the base. That’s how it is. It’s power to the people and not the other way round. We had very good discussions in the ten regions and I think the party officials now know what is expected from them. Otherwise, meeting with Cameroonians was very interesting as well. For most of them, it was the first time they met a politician who came to listen rather than to talk and I think that as a politician, it is very important to listen to the people because you cannot defend them if you do not know what their ailments, challenges are. That’s exactly what we brought back from this nation-wide tour. We will organise a second nation-wide tour before the end of the year, to meet Cameroonians again and to tell them what the proposals are of the SDF for the way forward and the different public policies that we propose to tackle the major challenges that they told us they face. So it’s a very interesting time for our party, as I said, we have gone through challenging times and the challenging times were not only internal, they were also contextual (COVID), all of these is now behind us and so we are really building up towards offering Cameroonians the golden opportunity of a political change come 2025.
In your nation-wide tour, did you get the feeling that the SDF is still alive/strong? I read one or two remarks somewhere that the tour didn’t generate much enthusiasm; the popular effervescence was not there, that it was more or less a closed thing! Are the structures really really strong and alive?
Well, we’ve gone through about 33 years of SDF bashing, so we are not surprised by such. First of all, those who were saying that were not concerned by the work we were doing and because they were not concerned, they tried to put up something that will try to ridicule our work. It was one of the most successful series of events the party has ever held since its inception. At no one point would you expect to meet party officials in a stadium. When you respect party officials, you meet them in a convenient hall where at the end of your meeting you can have a drink and part off. At no one point was there an idea to hold a popular rally or to march in the streets of any city. The idea was to meet people where they are. For instance, when you want to meet the GICAM, you don’t go to the Omnisport stadium, they invite you either to a hotel or their premises; when you want to meet with the Medical Council, they have a hall for that and we have a hall too, so you arrange a date and meet them and they tell you what their challenges are. When you want to meet teachers, you do the same thing, bike riders, farmers etc, you meet them where they are and that could be eventually a public place but it doesn’t have to be a crowd that will make it difficult to listen to their challenges. When you talk to 20 farmers in 20 different eco-systems country-wide, you get a better feeling what their challenges are and why not sit with them inside their kitchens and talk to them, let them tell you what their daily challenges are so you better understand. When you go and meet fishers, you don’t invite them to a stadium, you go to the beach, gather and sit down with them and talk with them. That is politics; that is meeting the people, it’s not about making noise and being on facebook. It’s about being efficient. If am going round the country to touch base with the Cameroonian people, it’s not about doing popular events, it’s about really going where they are, touching base with them, listening to them and coming back knowing I have a better understanding where Cameroonians are. I mean, everybody always told me all over, no matter their social status, they told me this is the first time they are meeting a politician who is coming to listen to them and it was so refreshing and even me, I had to learn to listen because that was challenging as well because I had never gone through that exercise before.
Post convention; we’ve seen your two challengers resign from the party. Are those resignations just epiphenomenal or there’s still some deeper cuts within the party? Are there cracks that are being pampered or this was just an epiphenomenal problem?
Well, first of all, I would like to say that personally, I haven’t received resignation from anybody so as the National Chairman of the party and to the best of my knowledge, the party Secretary General hasn’t received any resignations too. So, if those resignations are on facebook, it’s probably time we received them. The issue I want to raise here too is that the Convention was organised right after the funeral of our late National Chairman, and we had gone through a lot but we needed to have that Convention in order to have a new start. You would remember that the day we buried the late National Chairman was the initial day we had planned to hold the Convention and the National Chairman had wished to be present during that Convention without being a candidate. Unfortunately, that Convention turned into a funeral and so we had to move it forward. Being in the mourning mood allowed for a lot of tolerance and so we closed our eyes on a lot of details that could have brought some sort of tension probably before going into the Convention proper. I have to say here that I don’t want to call names but the two challengers you talked about, to the best of my understanding as I know the Constitution of the party, were first and foremost would not have in a normal Convention be qualified to be candidates. I for one stood my grounds firm for them to stand because I didn’t want to be the interim Chairman of the party going in for the Chairmanship and being the one eliminating political competition. By the way competition is a good thing; it makes you work well, it makes you progress, so it was a very good thing that they presented their candidatures. It was also a good thing because you could see who is who in the party according to who was going behind which candidate, so it helps you to better position people you probably trusted less that you trust much more today and so on and so forth. To answer your question, I don’t see any cracks because if you go for a Convention for a position and the majority of delegates do not endorse your position and you decide to resign there after, it means that you were never serious about running in the first place and your objectives must have been different than those of managing the party. If you really want to manage the party, you build up again during the five-year mandate so that when you come back, you come back stronger and challenge the incumbent even stronger and why not if you are a smart politician and you understand the laws of the country and the Constitution of Cameroon, and you want to be the SDF Chairman, you go and make sure that if the incumbent Chairman, Joshua Osih is a presidential candidate and becomes president of Cameroon, he is automatically disqualified from being president of the party, then there will be a vacancy that you can come and fill up. So you don’t have to fight against, you rather have to fight for to create those vacancies that will allow you emerge. So, it just shows that they were not with the party at the time they stood as candidates and they were not looking forward to make this party greater because as soon as they did not succeed, they came out of the party to fight the party. Because creating your own party means fighting the party. It’s just like you are candidate to become president of Cameroon, you fail, and become Nigerian the next day. It makes absolutely no sense.
You have put in place National Advisory Council, NEC is full, the Shadow Cabinet has been put in place. With all these structures, can you say everybody has the vision of the Chairman, or are we seeing disparate voices. The SDF has been known for always having disparate voices and differences which at times spill over!
When you are in power, by the simple fact that you are in power you hold your members together because you can reward them through the tentacles of power. When you are in opposition, there is nothing more you can sell than hope, so it is evident that the risk of supporting is much bigger than when you are in power. So every party in opposition in any country in the world has the same issues. Now, what is very important is be very very strict with discipline and with the orientation of the party in matters of ideology. We are social democratic party and we have to make sure that each public policy position we take is in line with the fundamental social democratic principles. Once you make sure that discipline is respected and that the ideology is followed, those who do not follow don’t have a problem with you or a group of people, they have a problem with the party. And so it means they are not in the right place. So, I have no problem with them, whether they leave or they toe the line or whatever they do, I do not have a problem with them, I have a duty to take care of all those who follow the line, who are disciplined and who are social democrats and want to advance and want us to advance together. I always tell in meetings (this didn’t start as Chairperson of the party) that when you are in a political party, it’s just as if you are in a Church. You don’t have to like your neighbour, there’s nothing like love in an association, we have to respect each other and we have to work together so that the association in which we are becomes stronger. That is what I ask for and that is why I tell people don’t run around and say this man likes me and this man doesn’t like me, no. We are all working for the association, which is the SDF party and there are people who can bring in bunches of plantain to make the association stronger, others can bring in money, others can bring in ideas, others can walk down from trenches, so everybody has his or her role to play. I am not looking for a uniformed party where everybody is similar like in the military or a Communist party. I am looking at a party that is modern, jovial, that moves ahead and gives quality proposals to Cameroonians so that Cameroonians can make informed choices when votes come, to vote for the right party and the right candidate.
You are talking about voting and elections are around the corner. I know you have answered these questions a lot but they will keep on coming up. What is the SDF’s position concerning coalitions? Is the SDF going to coalise with other parties? Is the SDF open and waiting for others to come or is the SDF working for parties to coalise?
The SDF was born to change, kick out the system that is holding Cameroon down since 1961. The SDF was born to bring power to the people. The SDF was born on the promise of social justice and equal opportunities. On the premises of all what I just said, the SDF is not a party that has as a key focus a presidential election to perpetuate jacobinistic systems that has killed Cameroon so far. We are against that system. The only reason why people are talking about a coalition is because they want to perpetuate the system. They want to either say they’ll become president and kill the system or they will become president to replace the current president and to perpetuate the system. So one or the other is close to each other. The idea am trying to bring out here is that when you are talking about a coalition, it means that all you have in mind is the presidential election and it means that you agree that the president of the republic should have 99% of all the powers and the rest of Cameroonians should share the 1% left, no. The SDF believes that power should be brought back to the people. We want to deconstruct the system that is actually governing us because that is what is killing us. Power needs to go to the people means that we can only have a federal democracy/dispensation whereby all the powers and all the money goes to the councils and only what the councils cannot do, where they are incompetent by virtue of the nature of the council or by nature of the public service that has to be put in place. At that level, we will go one step up and call it the regions or whatever will take care of that. And only what the regions cannot do, will be done by Yaounde. So, Yaounde will be left with diplomacy, monetary issues, customs, defence and all what is national. Once we have that dispensation, in a normal country, people do not die to become presidents because the normal inhabitant of the country barely knows who the president is, because he doesn’t affect his daily life! The person who affects his daily life is the mayor. So we need to make sure that the people can choose their mayors and come out of the actual biased decentralisation in which we are today. Put in a federal dispensation where people can really choose their mayors, put them in place and trust them and when you have a good federal democracy, you can only become an MP or a President, once you have at least shown a tract record as a councillor or a mayor in your council before you move one step up. That’s why in most countries, you will never have a Minister who is not an elected official. So, this whole talk about a coalition going for a presidential election is only building up the wrong idea that we need to continue with a hyper strong President. No! As the SDF wishes it, we need to come down to a federal dispensation, a federal democracy, where the power is with the people and at the level of the councils. We believe that today CPDM regime is giving 4.2% of the budget to the descentralised entities; we believe that it must be at least 30% for the country to start developing correctly. The Major National Dialogue set it at 15% that is because we fought it but it is not even being respected. What we wished was 35% and we will be very comfortable coming to power and putting it at 30% and guess what; if a President comes to power and puts 30% of the State resources into the councils, the country will kick-start. The country will develop exponentially and that will make it such that each Cameroonian will be proud and will be able to hold his mayor accountable because it is difficult for a Cameroonian based in Mouloundou for instance, to hold Mr. Biya for what is going wrong. But it is much easier for them to hold their mayor accountable for the lack of delivery of services in their areas. That is why we strongly believe that the fight of the SDF should be the fight to bring about the new system of governance in Cameroon and the only system that can be applied for such a diverse country is Federalism. So if any other political party joins us on this fight, we will do the work together but if it is just to have a president, I guess the SDF is not interested. We are not interested because if you support someone else who has 99% of the powers, the whole system will just continue and so we need to have the lucidity to talk to each other and say ‘what is the orientation we are giving’ and the second thing is that we are of centre-left, we are social democrats. The worst thing that can happen to Cameroon is that a centre-left party and a right-wing party or even a far-right-wing party join together for a presidential election. Then you will have a government that cannot work. It will even be worse than what is happening today. So, you have to understand that when people ask those questions, it is because the only person benefitting from the answer to that question is the CPDM regime and that’s why they distill it in public opinion to make it such that they think there’s no coalition…that is completely wrong. Those who have the same ideas will naturally come together; there is absolutely no reason that party A and party B that each of them have 90% of the same programmes compete. If they continue competing, that means they don’t believe in their programmes. I believe firmly, deeply in the programmes, making it such that the individual who represents such programmes is no longer the issue.
But are you working towards federating the centre-left parties and associations?
In that sense, we took our responsibilities before all these noise started. We first of all coalise the labour civil society that is the trade unions and it is working very well. We are having our meetings, we are exchanging with each other because it comes from the point that a social democratic party in a normal dispensation is an outcome of the trade unions. And normally in all social democratic parties, trade unions have their say. You cannot have a trade union without a social democratic party and vice versa. So we came together to correct that and it has been working on nicely and the way we brought everybody on the same table to agree is that we are fighting for labour rights; the SDF is the only party that has tabled three private member bills to increase the minimum salaries in Cameroon. But the problem we had is that this trade union will be on this amount and the other trade union will be on that amount and we are on another amount! So we said let us come together and agree on a consensual amount and as soon as we sat and agreed, CDC workers got a pay increase though they are not being paid. The wish we have is that the minimum salary be at least at 150,000FCFA in five years and we have the capacity to put that in place. So we put the trade unions together which is part of our DNA and then the second point was to put together the Centre-left and Left-wing parties together. We have quite some challenges because the nature of Left-wing parties as the SDF is there is always dissention but we brought together about 12 parties. We signed a common declaration. This is work in progress. During the months of June, we will come back together as well to try to progress. It’s quite a tedious job but we are progressing and am very comfortable that we are on track.
Mr. National Chairman, you said you want to bring down the system but all of us know that at one time in the National Assembly, there was coalition of opposition parties to work for electoral reforms. How far have you people gone?
We have completed the job and you (The SUN Yaounde) received a copy of the work we did. We came together, again it was the idea of the SDF in Parliament to bring together the opposition parties in Parliament and later we had this very good idea to open up to the MRC which we did and later on invited the USDP as well and we have given a copy of the work to the President of the Republic, to the President of the Board of ELECAM, to the DG of ELECAM, to the Minister of Territorial Administration.
Are you sure we will have electoral reforms before the next elections?
Our job was not to reform the electoral code; we are in opposition. Our job was to have a common front. No changes could have happened or can happen if the position of the SDF, MP, UDC, MRC are different. So the first thing that needed to be done was for us to agree on the minimals. We didn’t agree on many points in the electoral code and we agreed that we didn’t agree but on all the ones we agreed, we made our proposals.
You have been talking a lot about political transitions. I remember in the last end of the National Assembly, the speaker of the house was very hot against it. What do you mean by political transitions? What do you want to achieve by that?
There is a lot in that phrase but essentially, you have to understand that we are talking about transition. We are conscious of the fact that we are at the end of a cycle and a new cycle needs to be engaged. We want that transition to be political, neither violent nor militarised nor in-house by constitutional coup. I have absolutely no problem for anybody to be candidate for any election. The fact that you are called Biya should not be an element of elimination. You go through an election to pass, that’s a good thing. The word political and transition put together have all their sense; political transition is not a transition of people, it is a transition of system, we have to go from one system to another system. This system has failed us for 64 years, we need to go into the next system that can help us emerge. There is absolutely nothing to take home from this system in the past 64 years, so it is important that inside-political transition puts in that element of systematic change as well.
In the last NEC, you emphasised on registration and you condemned the issue of a lot of Cameroonians not having birth certificates hence they can’t have ID cards and so on. What’s the SDF doing to solve this problem and getting Cameroonians register on the electoral lists which ends on August 31 and what proposals are you bringing up for the issue of birth certificates and ID cards?
The first part I think we have been working for voter registration since 1995.
But it appears people have become discouraged since there is no change!
The point is that voter registration is a perpetual exercise. People don’t stop going to Church because their lives do not change. You become a citizen by being registered and as long as you are not registered, you are part of the problem and that is what we tell Cameroonians. We tell Cameroonians that they need to be registered to become part of the solution and to make informed choices whenever a vote comes, so that they can complain thereafter. You have no right to complain if you are not registered, actually you are not a citizen if you are not registered and in most countries, registration is mandatory. Well, for evident reasons, Mr. Biya made it voluntary and you can see that we need a lot of energy to push people to come and register. But I want to tell Cameroonians that registration to vote is free, it’s easy, it takes one minute and it allows you to decide on what your life will be for the next five years and especially, it permits you to build a solid foundation for your children. If you stay home and you don’t vote, you are just simply letting your neighbours decide on the future of your children. So at the end of the day, don’t complain. It is a very important exercise and I think at the level of the party, we’ve been doing everything possible to achieve this. We are probably the only party in Cameroon present in nearly all the 360 local electoral mixed commissions. It’s a very great feat and am very proud of that and we are pushing all these our representatives to do more everyday and I can see what they are doing on the field and am very happy. Now one very big challenge is that of bringing the registration closer to voters. In many places it’s nearly impossible especially in the North West and South West and Far North regions and it is an extremely complex situation for us but we are working on it day and night and we will not tell you what strategies we are putting in place to try to correct that.
On the ID card issue, my nation-wide tour brought it out as the number 1 problem of Cameroonians today. We estimate about 11 million Cameroonians without an ID card currently, which is deadly. I met this lady in the Moungo division, who told me she doesn’t have an ID card since 11 years now and she actually lost her brother and couldn’t bury him because she cannot travel because she doesn’t have an ID card. Imagine that if you don’t have an ID card you cannot travel, you can’t go to school. This lady couldn’t continue her education because she doesn’t have an ID card for the past 11 years and to get that ID card, she needs to go through two police barriers before she gets to the tarred road and she is convinced that she will be picked up before she reaches her destination. She told me she is living in the biggest prison in the world because she can’t go anywhere or do anything. So you see how important it is. What is happening is that the government of Cameroon has actually successfully made more than 11 million people stateless. This is how deep the problem is and if you don’t bring those people out of the situation, we are going straight into chaos. All these stateless people are hopeless people, they are the ones being recruited into the bushes and into Boko Haram and so on because they are available and there is nothing else they can do, they can’t go anywhere, they can’t go for a job interview, they can’t write a public exam, they can’t get into the army because all of these need an ID card to get into. They basically do not exist. So it’s something that needs to be done and when the mayors in their last conclave say that 6 million Cameroonians do not have a birth certificate, am sure that they are even more. That is a scandal and it is a scandal today that the elements to make a birth certificate are as they are and I made it abundantly clear. It is a situation that has been made complex by this government’s incompetence and that has to be brought down in order to put in place a system that is straight forward where people can go and identify themselves, get their ID cards and become human beings.
Mr. Chairman, before the Convention, the party was supposed to have done complete re-organisation in all the Structures. But what we realised after the Convention is that there are still a lot of Structures without functional electoral districts. Where I am coming from in Fako division for instance, there are still lots of areas which have not been re-organised. How will these people not having functional electoral districts mobilise, take their militants/Cameroonians to register. Has the party put in place measures that all re-organised structures will have to draw from? Any deadlines set?
Well, you talked about Fako and the policy we have is that we are sending nobody to get killed. We want a social democratic Cameroon through the ballot box and not through the bullet. In all the places where progress would mean that you risk your life, we do not push anyone. The day I send someone for a meeting and he gets killed, you can be rest assured that I will have problem on my conscience and the entire party as well. That is not part of the exercise so I can tell you with a lot of assurance that everything that was humanly possible to be done has been done and we are very happy with the work that has been done and we are moving forward. In those places where violence prevails, we have a whole different approach that will not be shared in the open.
At last, I hope Tiko has been put to rest from the elections of last Saturday
Tiko was not in unrest!
I mean the electoral district election which went over so many times!
It is a normal process. We are a democratic party where people have rights to petition what went wrong. The first election that held in Tiko with Joshua Osih as the National President, I went to Tiko and talked with the two parties and tried to get a political solution so that all of them can move together. However, each party thought they were stronger than the other which is their full right and so we decided that NEC organises a re-run. The re-run was held on Saturday, May 25 which was the deadline. The pre-liminary report I have is that everything went on very well and am waiting for the final report to congratulate the new executive and we move on from there. It has never been in unrest, it’s just that it is a process that kept coming back because people kept petitioning.
What we took note in Tiko was that a list system was introduced. We don’t know if that’s what is going to happen in other district elections. Is it a new system adopted by the SDF?
Well, the list system was not introduced per se. One could choose each and every candidate they wanted to choose. It’s just that the candidate decided that their own people should be below them. There’s no clear definition on how the single ballot should be presented. I would have presented it differently but it has worked that way so far for both parties.
It seems as if the party does not want to communicate on the post-Progressive Alliance meeting. Not much has been said about it!
The Progressive Alliance in Africa Conference held in Douala from the 23rd to the 24th of May. We had quite some logistical challenges for many participants. We ended up with about 15 countries present which was a lot of the 30 because you have to consider that many are in the electoral cycles or have other challenges right now. We would hold another meeting towards the end of the year. It will likely be in Douala again or probably Yaounde. We had fruitful deliberations during our two-day meeting. It was a preparatory meeting to prepare the African Block to go to Santiago de Chile, where the Congress of Progressive Alliance will be held beginning October. So we needed to agree on our positions and we further agreed that we will hold another meeting right after the October meeting. We need to agree on the board members we present for the Progressive Alliance, we need to agree on the Coordinator and all those positions so that we do not go to Santiago de Chile and start arguing amongst ourselves. It is good that the African Block gets there and is clear on its positions. This is just what we successfully did during these two days.
Of recent, we have seen government cramping down on the opposition either through injunctions against you people calling for massive registration; we’ve seen the Minister of Territorial Administration giving warnings to some opposition political parties. Is the SDF concerned or not bothered?
We are very concerned and each time individual or collective liberties are jeopardized, we are very concerned. We do not feel concerned by the Minister’s outings but we feel concerned that some people may be concerned by his outings. As such, we believe that what has to be done is first of all to take stock of where we come from and I would like to say that we are probably less-preoccupied by those outings because after 34 years of existence, and in those days nobody warned us, we would be killed, we will be locked up, we will be burnt down, lose our jobs and businesses etc. I think what is happening today should call on all of those who feel threatened to revisit what the SDF went through. People died, some went to jail just because we were holding a Convention. Nobody has the monopoly of martyrdom but we have quite a long history of having gone through that and so I think in order to come out of this very tense context, we should sit together and share the experiences of the SDF. The SDF has paid the highest price after the UPC in the fight for the liberation of Cameroon and we should take stock of that experience to make sure that we can manage our way.
Does it mean now the SDF is not bothering government too much because it appears the SDF is now toeing the line, reason why there are no direct injunctions/warnings to the party?
We are not toeing any line. Experience has taught us that moving forward, there are things that are important to do and things that are less important to do. Experience has taught us that what the regime wants is exactly that type of atmosphere, that’s what they are looking for, so we don’t give them an excuse to be in it. That’s why you see that the SDF emphasizes on having a very strong legal team. If you look at the structure of each and every executive committee of the party, you see that the legal advisers are the biggest. For instance, there are 10 of them in the NEC, whereas we have just about five Secretaries General. We started with two legal advisers and today we have 10 because we know where the real battles are. That’s why I say that when you are in difficulties, meet your peers, share experiences and move on. Am not saying we have the solution, far from it, but we know what to do at what time and what not to do at a certain time to move on. I think it’s because we are much better maneuvering in this very high tides and the fact that our boat is not wet inside does not mean we are in a different environment, we face the same waves. Not later than yesterday, most of our anniversary activities were banned and one of them in Douala II was dislocated completely by military elements. We know how it works, we don’t make noise about it because when you make noise, you give them the chance to be big and we have understood that that is not how to win elections. During the 20th May march pass we had 18 localities where we were banned from marching because they refused to carry the effigy of the Head of State which is again a misinterpretation of the directives that were given by the Minister of Territorial Administration who said that “the only effigy that can be held is that of the Head of State”. I agree, because otherwise you will have all types of effigies but it didn’t oblige us to carry that of the Head of State. The circular letter never said we must, so if we did not have one, you could not block us from marching but we understand that those Divisional Officers come from ENAM so we understand the kind of education that they must have had. Those of our militants who were blocked from marching used another itinerary and marched around the whole town and it instead gave them more publicity than if they did it at the grandstand. So, we have to be creative in the way we react to all of these things and I think 34 years of experience takes us a long way and allows us to navigate those trouble waters much better than those who just came yesterday. Luckily enough also, because we meet quite often and because we brainstorm on all those issues, we have found our little ways of moving around them and moving on. I was blocked from entering in the South and we turned the event into a small rally and today we have a Ward. One of the boys who blocked us, the most vocal has become our Ward chairperson. That’s politics.
Mr Chairman, this last question. Has the SDF blocked the processes of reconciliation especially with former members and those in awkward situations in the party? Is reconciliation still going on in the party or has it stopped?
Your question has no object and no objective and no answer because for reconciliation to happen, it needs to have at least two parties who do not agree. Am not aware of that! If anybody knocks at the door of the SDF, we can take it from there but as of today, nobody has knocked on the door of the SDF, so you will agree with me that if we need to work on any such project, we will need to have somebody who was part of the party, may be committed some mistakes and may be had to leave the party or decided to resign and wants to come back. I just want to mention that no reconciliation is necessary for anyone who resigned because the Constitution gives the person the right to come back to the party the next day. All he has to do is to start from the base. Those who need to go through the Convention are those who got sacked from the party and for that to happen, they need to write to the party to say they want to return and from that point on we can then handle it. As of today, the Secretary General of the party has zero such files.
Thank you, Mr Chairman for giving us one hour of your time. What last message?
I will like to wish all the best to all our members and sympathizers out there and to remind them that it is only through hard work that we can get to where we want to go. We are the only political party in which Cameroonians hope for a better change because we are not only working for change but better change because we are tackling a system and not individuals, so we need each and everyone on board in order that we leave no stone unturned to deliver this country in 2025.
Thank you very much
You are welcome.
Quotes for Front Page
– The SDF was born to change, kick out the system that is holding Cameroon down since 1961
–The worst thing that can happen to Cameroon is that a centre-left party and a right-wing party or even a far-right-wing party join together for a presidential election. Then you will have a government that cannot work
– Registration to vote is free, it’s easy, it takes one minute and it allows you to decide on what your life will be …You have no right to complain if you are not registered, actually you are not a citizen if you are not registered
–We estimate about 11 million Cameroonians without an ID card currently