By Ngoko Monyadowa
By November 6, 2022, 40 years would have elapsed since President Biya mounted the podium as undisputed leader of Cameroon.
By a stroke of Ahidjo’s pen, he became the Head of State and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. The frenzy that accompanied this indiscretion has remained unprecedented given the authoritarian and arm-twisting governance that had held sway prior to Ahidjo’s exit from power.
In the event, refrains like “rigour and moralization”- the quintessence of “Communal Liberalism,” a book detailing a new political ethos whose authorship had been erroneously ascribed to President Biya, became the swan song of self-styled modernists. Today, at least two persons (Francois Borgia Marie Evembe and Charlie Gabriel Mbock), who under the superintendence of Francois Senghat Kouh, had participated in the realisation of this patent intellectual fraud have denounced this project whose essence was to rebrand and reposition Cameroon.
With incontrovertible evidence that he was not the author of Communal Liberalism and the real authors haven been advertently or inadvertently sidelined from the implementation team, it became increasingly unfeasible for President Biya to provide purposeful leadership. Of course, conventional wisdom informs that it is difficult to be manager of a project without first all mastering its conceptual underpinnings. If this were to be the case, there would be a permanent predicament of relying on others because leadership of a country is akin to project management.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biya’s jam had been compounded very early into his ascendancy by the illusion that his grip on power was slipping because of the inadmissible presence of perceived intruders from alien tribes, which delusion assumed the colouring of an obsession with constant need to be surrounded by trusted kinsmen. This perception, inexorably runs counter to the elementary notion that a leader must exude the capacity to carry along all his subordinates who must in turn buy into his vision and mission in order to attract ownership.
It is obvious from the above that leadership requires more than diligence and assiduity in perusing files that come for evaluation that assist in decision making.
It also, attracts more than the ability to acquire by rote, the niceties of Latin and ancient Greek philosophy and civilization which are at the core of President Biya’s acclaimed strength. Indeed, the pinnacle of leadership hinges on the ability to dream of a project, visualize it and eventually convert it to a mission from which goals and objectives can be extracted and put in motion for eventual realization. However, in our case, the coming into being of a new Cameroon as envisioned in Communal Liberalism could not have been possible given that its conception and birth were in the hands of midwives who were eventually sidelined – a circumstance that occasioned stillbirth.
Hence, the advent and perpetration of all the ills (corruption, profligacy, nepotism and laissez-faire and free rein governance) that the book had set out to denounce and eventually offer corrective measures.
It is not surprising therefore, that in the heat of the ship of state’s drift into avoidable wreckage owing to irrational leadership, provocative ripostes like “ou sont les preuves,” began surfacing when the President was confronted with trending allegations of his family’s involvement in the notorious scam that emptied the vaults of SCB Credit Lyonnais Bank. The investigators were routinely harassed with some going into voluntary exile. As if this was not enough, the wind of change from the East reared its head and with it, the advent of political pluralism that introduced new variables into the political firmament.
On the side of an embattled Mr. Biya is an inordinately loyal army whose superior officers are judiciously chosen from trusted kinsmen, a highly politicized and corrupt civil service and a predatory political class in France that ensures that their pre-independence cooperation agreements that summersaulted our independenceare deeply entrenched in exchange for security backing. This explains why Mr. Biya has defied bookmakers to retain power for close to 40 years despite glaring evidence that he has lost legitimacy that had in any case, been secured through stage-managed elections.
The upshot of this amalgam of authoritarianism and laissez- faire system of government is an invidious over-centralization that keeps power in the hands of a few glorified civil servants who in the guise of being representatives of the President run their personal estates at the sub Divisional, Divisional and Regional levels. In this jungle where freebooting unleashes a free- for- all there can be no talk of conviviality between the governing class and the subaltern populations.
While free rein is promoted within the privileged class of civil servants who can steal as much as is available from the public till, the hapless citizenry is consigned to unfathomable oppression via forces of law and order that inject more disorder into the polity than they are called to fight against. Thus, any attempt to repel this pervasive alienation from governance is met with ruthlessness that more often than not occasions many deaths. The idea here is to instill fear.
With this combination of fear and docility embedded in the minds of Cameroonians, the governing class has to insist on maintaining the status quo while the majority languishes in routine extortion from an oppressive tax system that robs the poor to carter for the opulent live styles of a callous oligarchy. A glaring example of his blatant refusal to avail the citizenry of their inalienable right to water, light, food and decent housing is the much vaunted decentralization mantra that has in the past quarter of a century exercised the minds of concerned Cameroonians. As this rigmarole plays out, 85 percent of the annual budget is left in the hands of a privileged few in Yaounde while even the token 15 percent that was promised the local councils is taking ages to reach the intended beneficiaries.
Managing local councils has become rocket science whose mastery is limited to a few civil servants from ENAM, as if apart from learning how to serve the ruling party and by extension the government in power, there are any salient features in their curriculum that reflect a sustained effort to promote humane governance.
Of course, like its predecessors Rigour and moralization, Decentralisation could not have taken root as intended by its progenitors owing to the circumstance of its emergence as acountry-wide conversation topic. In actual fact, Joseph Owona and his coterie of manipulators had concocted this ruse as a counterpoise to Anglophone irredentism that had assumed a frenetic proportion.
To ward off the unremitting fervor that trailed this phenomenon, a palliative had to be sought somehow, to douse the embers of Anglophone political renaissance. What else, then than a 26-year slow poison dubbed decentralization, to lull Anglophone politicians into deep slumber. Curiously, this has failed to unleash the intended venom and the upshot has been drudgery for 24,000,000 Cameroonians and an internecine war pitting government against separatist militia.
Once more, personal aggrandizement, greed, avarice and disregard for humanity have elicited misery and hate culture among Cameroonians owing to the ostentatious display of ill-gotten wealth by the ruling class whose gentrification in itself is a source of outrage given that there are no clear-cut admission criteria.
Did I hear you say Mr. Biya is intelligent? Well, my answer to this question is to refer any doubting Thomas to the latter’s encounter with Moh Ibrahim in France when he was deterred from using his prepared notes. Of course, goofed big time! He unconsciously, confessed to a planned, sustained and deliberate attempt to assimilate Anglophones. Any doubt then that we are today writhing in the pains of an avoidable internecine war?