By Besong Sandrine Ebot
Until date, November 18, 2024, the real cause of the death of a Buea-based journalist, Samuel Wazizi, is still very much unknown to the Cameroonian public as well as his journalism colleagues across Cameroon and beyond. To say the least, the truth about what happened to him is still a mystery.
Wazizi, a Buea-based journalist, who worked as a news anchor for Chillen Media Television, CMTV, Buea, was arrested on August 2, by military operatives. He was taken into custody and that was it.
He was accused by the Government forces of having links with the Anglophone separatist fighters; an accusation that many other innocent Anglophones, before him, had equally suffered from.
His accusation was tied to the fact that, following the socio-political crisis that broke out between Cameroon’s government forces and Anglophone separatist fighters, most journalists reporting objectively on the crisis were being tagged as separatist sympathisers or associates.
Thus, after the accusations against Wazizi which were as a result of his objective reports on the crisis, he was arrested and, initially, detained in Buea.
He was, some days later, surreptitiously transferred to Yaounde where he was jailed and later died.
But until date as I write, his corpse has never been seen nor returned to his family for burial.
Following his arrest, Buea-based human rights lawyers filed a court case where they demanded for the Government to free the journalist, Wazizi.
After several court sessions with the Government being unable to produce him in court or free him, Cameroonian journalists joined their voices to ask the Government to free their colleague.
It was only some months after, that’s early in June 2020, when journalists marched to the Southwest’s Governor’s office in Buea to demand for the release of their colleague, that the Military Communication Officer, Col. Cyrille Serge Atonfack, came out with a communique to explain away Wazizi’s death.
According to Atonfack, Wazizi died of “severe sepsis” at a Yaounde military hospital on August 17th, 2019.
Also, Col. Atonfack said that, after his death, his remains were preserved at a morgue in Yaounde.
But, four years after, that’s today, November, 2024, the corpse or remains of the late journalist, Wazizi, have never been released to the family nor has he been given a decent burial.
Thus we, as journalists, are by this article demanding that Government should shed more light on what happened to Samuel Wazizi following his arrest and disappearance since August 5th, 2019.
It’s a sad situation that since the onset of the Anglophone crisis that has been raging in the two English-speaking Regions of the Northwest and Southwest, journalists have, unfortunately, been the target for arrests, detentions and even killings, like the case of Wazizi by Government forces.
In 2017, three journalists, Tim Finian of the Life Times Newspaper in Bamenda, Atia Tilarious of The Sun Newspaper in Limbe and one other were among a number of Anglophone journalists who were arrested and locked up at the Kondengui Maximum Security prison in Yaounde.
They spent eight gruesome months before they were released.
Since, then several others have either suffered arrests, been banned from reporting on the crisis or fled the country for fear of their lives.
The Government, therefore, must put a stop to this, give a veritable account of what happened to Wazizi and let the journalists be allowed to continue doing their work without fear or favour as ascribed in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.