By DIEUDONNÉ ESSOMBA
Two examples should guide the Government in its attempts to present a participation rate without any proximity to reality.
The first case is Iran’s attempt to cover up the blunder of its army which accidentally fired on a Boeing. Instead of quickly acknowledging the error, the government tried to cover it up until it was forced to acknowledge it under the pressure of the evidence. This has not made Iran grow in the eyes of its people or the world.
The second case is China’s attempt to mask the coronavirus epidemic. While a doctor had understood and understood the tragedy that was taking shape and had warned, the government instead closed his mouth, accusing him of spreading false news, certainly to sabotage the Communist Party. Today, the Chinese government is overtaken by this tendency to hide the truth in the name of politics.
This means that there is no intelligence to fabricate high participation rates when the whole world has seen a very low rate. Far from growing the regime, this kind of fabrication rather aggravates the feeling of a desperate group forced to resort to even the most shameless lies.
The Government should not hide the strong abstention, at the risk of comforting the supporters of the boycott in a fallacious success. We are not in boycott, but in a general disaffection of the political thing, linked on the one hand to the absence of significant electoral stake, but especially to a kind of weariness in front of a total lack of prospects of resolution of the problems from Cameroon.
ECONOMICALLY, the Government is in the process of negotiating the second phase of structural adjustment with the IMF, the hardest phase, that which is experiencing wage cuts, workforce reductions, privatizations in cascades, increases in prices of basic necessities, devaluation, etc. However, the planned investments have not been made and the infrastructure is falling apart, with no possibility of rehabilitating it.
ON THE POLITICAL PLAN, the Secession rages more than ever. She ousted the state and reduced its presence to military islands, making her presence at NOSO look like an occupying force. Nothing is done there without military coverage: the elections were held there with the National Army, and only where it is concentrated. Everywhere else, people remained wallowed, paralyzed by fear of the Secessionists. The Feast of February 11 has hardly taken place, apart from a few symbolic parades.
The question also arises: the administrative authorities have all fled the armed combatants, and those who still reside there are only under cover of the military fortifications. How will municipal councilors and mayors exercise? Will they also benefit from the same military protection? And at what price? The NOSO problem is bleeding the public treasury blank; how long will it last?
SOCIALLY, it is not much better. We have seen the murders that are increasing in educational establishments, without the state being able to do anything, if not haphazard interventions opposing the teachers to the administration and the police. We can cite other problems, such as rampant insecurity, drugs, etc.
It is all these failures that have created the disaffection of the populations and not any slogan. And to see the speech of the Head of State for youth, we can see that neither President Biya nor his entourage understood anything. Indeed, this speech consecrates this totally backward-looking vision of governance based on the “Grand Comrades”, the “Helmsmen”, the “Unique miracles”, the “Mount Cameroon of thought”, all this tralala of obsolete regimes, where an individual claims to take on his back all the misery of the country and positions himself as a magic deity responsible for developing it through his charisma, putting the citizens aside.
It’s a model that has failed everywhere. A Head of State is only a public official and he is only that. Its mission is to use collective resources to meet the collective needs of the Nation. He is not and can never be assimilated to a kind of magic divinity which, through his word, distributes goods and happiness.
What we blame the Biya regime is precisely there: to paralyze the Cameroonians with a drying ideology of national unity which, ultimately, boils down to the creation of a parasitic bureaucracy which draws on the meager resources of the nation to feed a sumptuous lifestyle while claiming to develop the country.
And for 37 years, it’s been the same speech: “I’m going to fight unemployment”, “I’m going to improve incomes”, “I’m going to limit imports”, etc.
And for 37 years, it’s the same result: unemployment remains massive, incomes remain capped and the trade deficit takes on an increasingly explosive character.
An elementary rule has been explained and re-explained to the Government: “who embraces too badly embraces”. It is not possible for a state the size of Cameroon to effectively manage strategic and operational needs with a single decision center. Such a model has never led to success anywhere. It’s a gross lie to believe for a moment that we can develop such a poor, disparate, heterogeneous and heterogeneous country with a single decision-making center. This is impossible because you cannot effectively manage information, ensure good decision control, or make optimal decisions. All resources are drowning in attempts to neutralize the centrifugal tendencies of such a system, and the maintenance of an impotent, greedy and corrupt bureaucracy.
Gradually the political system is blocked, paralyzed by its own organization.
And this is precisely the case of Cameroon.
There is therefore no solution to the problems of Cameroon in the unitary state. On the contrary, this state will multiply tensions to the infinite, tensions which can only be resolved in the end in a generalized conflagration.
The only possible solution is the division of the 5,000 billion by two: half for the Central State which will be limited to the strategic actions of the State, namely Defense, diplomacy, structuring infrastructures, etc.
The other half to the regional states which will recover all the operational missions of the state. And everyone manages at home, without complaining that Yaoundé does not like him. If your schools are in huts, if your roads are full of crevices, it will no longer be because the President does not love you, but because your elites are zero.
This is how the regime will liberate itself and at the same time liberate the Cameroonians by causing them to produce the best of themselves.
This model where an individual takes himself for a demiurge dressed in messianic powers is not good for anyone.
You absolutely have to get out!