Politics

The body of a Cameroonian soldier who was killed in Nigeria on March 13 while fighting Boko Haram has arrived Cameroon, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

L’Oeil du Sahel newspaper said the body of Ganava André who was killed around the locality of Kumshe in Nigeria arrived Maroua, the regional capital of Cameroon’s far north, on Tuesday. 

Boko Haram has killed about 150 Cameroonian soldiers and policemen since 2014 and about 2000 people about the same period in over 500 gun and bomb attacks, including more than 50 suicide bombings.

Not long ago, as attacks escalated in Nigeria, the governor of Borno, the birth place of Boko Haram, said he needed help now “more than ever before”.

President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria and his government have repeatedly claimed that Boko Haram had been decimated but recent incidents show that the “godless, mindless” militants are far from being defeated. 

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Simon Ateba

15.Mar.2017

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Dr Richard Tanto, a renowned International Peace Consultant and Director of Ecumenical Service for Peace in Yaounde, meticulously describes what he calls the solution to the Anglophone problem that has been rocking Cameroon for the past 4 months. In an exclusive interview, he condemns present competitive measures and calls for collaboration of both government and activists.

“When you are competing your interests are more important to you than your relationship, you want to get your interests at all cost. This is what is happening right now. The Anglophones are struggling to get their interests at all cost through organizing ghost towns, boycotting school and so on. Government too wants to get its interest by blocking internet, imprisoning activists, and banning the consortium. These are competitive attitudes and approaches and they are not going to solve this problem” says Dr Richard.
He explains his understanding of the crisis and raises concerns about the issue of interests of both government and protesting Anglophones. 

The International Peace Consultant says “Collaboration means that we as a people identify our interests and bring them to the table for discussion. From my understanding of this entire crisis, it seems to me that the interest of the Anglophones is to have legal guarantees for their rights, so that they can constantly remind government that this is what we deserve because without this they may not be able to exercise or claim their rights. On the other side, government is afraid that this people might secede. Now both parties need guarantee. Government needs to be sure that Anglophones are not seceding and Anglophones need to be sure that government will give their rightful share of the national cake”.

“Unfortunately the situation has moved from a simple protest to civil disobedience; and civil disobedience arises when people have completely lost faith in their leadership. So at this point we need trust building measures in order to restore some confidence which will permit both parties to discuss their interests” he adds. 

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Ndi Derek Giyoh

15.Mar.2017

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Honourable Enow Tanjong, the eldest Member of Parliament and President of the Provisional Bureau of the National Assembly says dialogue and effective decentralization is the way forward to the current Anglophone crisis.

He was speaking yesterday March 13 2017 in Yaounde during the opening of the 2017 legislative year at the national house of assembly.

Joseph Mbah-Ndam of the SDF thinks there are more important things concerning the crisis that the eldest Member of Parliament in the house could have pinpointed. He thinks the Dean could have dwelled more on lives lost and activists unlawfully detained rather than talking about decentralization and condemning burning of houses.

“20 years ago before I came to this parliament, they were talking about decentralization, we voted laws on decentralization. It’s not working” says Joseph Joseph Mbah-Ndam.

Hon Joseph Mbah-Ndam says federalism is the best form of government for this nation.

“We have awoken them on the virtues of federalism as a proper form of government for this nation, where we will be able to have the different regions manage their own affairs and stop this corrupt central governance which is dilapidating the wealth of this nation. We are opening a session with the backdrop of leaders of the civil societies of the northwest and southwest regions in prison, charged for offences that are unrelated with the issues involved.

My Dean did not make a notion to the fact that this is not what happened in the northwest and southwest of which he is a member of that community. He went ahead to condemn the burning of houses and so forth.


This to me is not more important than the human lives lost ” Hon. Joseph Mbah-Ndam says.

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Tawe Gije nkfunji

14.Mar.2017

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Nigerian Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has released a new propaganda video. The video obtained by Saharareporters was released by the Abubakar Shekau faction of Boko Haram.

The video which rendered in Hausa and Arabic was made with a series of footage showing Islamic priests, government officials and world leaders including a footage showing President Muhammad Buhari, Donald Trump, former US President Barack Obama and several European leaders.

Nigerian Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has released a new propaganda video. The video obtained by Saharareporters was released by the Abubakar Shekau faction of Boko Haram.
 
The video which rendered in Hausa and Arabic was made with a series of footage showing Islamic priests, government officials and world leaders including a footage showing President Muhammad Buhari, Donald Trump, former US President Barack Obama and several European leaders.

The high point of the video was the summary execution of three persons reportedly recruited by Nigeria’s  Directorate of Military Intelligence to infiltrate the group. The persons were gruesomely executed at the end of the 7-minute video.

The group also displayed a bevy of high-grade military weapons including what appeared to be anti-aircraft missiles while bragging that it remains firmly within a territory in Nigeria that the Nigerian army could not recapture.

Pulse.ng

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Rita Akana

14.Mar.2017

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The Binary Choice facing Biya:You might not have heard that Francophone teachers in East Cameroon are threatening to go on strike on March 27. Sure, their working conditions are terrible; School buildings falling apart, outdated didactic materials, morally depraved and unruly students, extremely corrupt school administrators, and even more corrupt bureaucratic officials in their ministry. These are all excellent causes for teachers to walk off the job.
But do you think any of these circumstances are mentioned in the reasons for the threatened strike? Not even one. The Francophone teachers are simply asking for more money in salaries and other allowances.
All of us are painfully aware that Anglophone teachers have been on strike since November, a large minority of them without pay. Their working conditions are not much better than those of their Francophone colleagues but for the fact that their students are better behaved. But their strike was motivated by moral and ethical principles, not father pay packets.
It’s not that Anglophone teachers would not welcome a few more francs in their pockets. But faced with the tide of francophonization that has been threatening to overwhelm and ultimately eradicate the Anglo-Saxon system of education, Anglophone teachers chose to act in a cause greater than their own personal well-being. They chose to defend our system of education whose comparative excellence was drawing an ever-increasing horde of undisciplined, badly brought up Francophone children fleeing the failing East Cameroonian model. Our teachers chose to protect our children from the contagion of the corrupt, ineffective Francophone model of education at the expense of their own financial interests, their freedom (their leaders locked up in Yaoundé) and even their lives.
I’ve stopped myself from feeling sorry for Francophone parents who are flooding even our village schools with their ungovernable children. If they had stood up to the corruption of their authorities and tried to emulate what was going on in West Cameroon, instead of mocking us as an inferior species of humans, they would not now be subjecting themselves to the humiliating spectacle of sending their children to schools in Fru Kangkang and other such exotic places in West Cameroon. They soiled themselves and thought they could get away from the stink by running to join us, succeeding only to make all of us smell bad.

Remember that the teachers joined an ongoing lawyers’ strike that was based on the same general principles: francophonization of our legal and judicial system, French-only legal texts, incompetent and highly corrupt Francophone magistrates and prosecutors flooding our courts and administering ‘justice’ in the language of our oppressors.

Both strikes remain in full force, schools are shuttered and the people of West Cameroon show their support for, and solidarity with the strikers by staying home every Monday, or however many days a week as directed by the strike leaders from their jail cells.

Biya’s Unappealing Choices

Paul Biya faces some stark choices, none of which is particularly appetizing. His latest attempt to disrupt the strikes by dispatching his prime minister Philemon Yang back to the North West region was a humiliating exercise for both men. Observers were scratching their heads, wondering what Biya and Yang thought they could accomplish, since Yang brought the same bag of tricks that the government had used over and over without any success. The same threats, the same attempts at bribery, the same cajoleries. It was like that definition of insanity, which says it is when you do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
That Yang will lose his job in the coming weeks is no longer a matter for debate. But Biya should know by now that West Cameroonians are no longer interested in the occasional games of ministerial musical chairs he plays with his corrupt cronies in Yaoundé. We’ve stopped caring about who is prime minister, minister or general. All we care about now is the right to govern ourselves and to decide, through free and fair elections, who governs us.
So Biya must make a painful choice in the next few weeks. He will either mount such a campaign of repression in West Cameroon that it would instantly be recognized as a bloodbath, because nothing short of that will return us to business as formally usual; he might have to destroy us to rule us!

But with the international community beginning to ride him hard, this might be difficult to pull off (he had a less than cordial meeting with the British high commissioner in Yaoundé last week). Also, the days when such atrocities could be carried out in secret are long gone. West Cameroon is crawling with the likes of Collins Nji, the 17-year-old Bamenda youngster who in January became the first African to win the global Google Code-in contest, whose prowess on all things digital will ensure that nothing Biya does will remain hidden or go unreported.

The other equally painful choice for Biya will be to climb down shamefully from his perch and negotiate directly with those Consortium leaders with whom he initially negotiated and, when they would not give in to his threats, had them locked up.
As for Biya’s view of Anglophones?

This is where the octogenarian dictator would be likely to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of the Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Never has been Biya or any other dictator been confronted with the phenomenon of a population destabilizing his regime by simply …. staying home. No demonstrators marching with placards, no rioters or looters presenting easy targets for the military or police to shoot and kill. Just the empty streets of Kumba and Kumbo, Mbengwi and Menji, Buea and Babungo.
Just peaceful silence. Biya be afraid, be very very afraid.

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Rita Akana

13.Mar.2017

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Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Hon Joseph Mbah Ndam who is Member of Parliament for the leading opposition Social Democratic Front, SDF party has revealed that at least 10 persons die every day in the Kondengui maximum security prison in Yaoundé. He made the shocking revelation last March 1, 2017 during an interview over the BBC World service for Africa and to Equinoxe Television channel.

Weeping over the fate of Anglophones who are arrested on daily basis and ferried to the already overcrowded prison in Yaoundé, Hon Joseph Mbah Ndam said “I visited the prison yesterday and returned from there very sadden when I talked to those who have been arrested and detained there. I discovered that most of them were sleeping on the ground. Some (Anglophones) who got wounded in the process of arrest are not being treated and the prison is overcrowded.”
He told the BBC and Equinoxe Tv that “In fact they told me there is an epidemic in the place and they are dying averagely 10 every week and when I tried to find out what the authorities are doing to amend the situation and after speaking with the prison superintendent, I discovered that he himself is helpless and is instead counting on goodwill gestures.”

The SDF MP and Barrister at law lamented that “it is quite unfortunate for us Cameroonians to have the kind of government we have today that takes decisions that are deplorable. I wonder why people are arrested in Anglophone Cameroon and transferred to Yaoundé where detention facilities are not even enough. We need to put party discipline aside and solve this situation for what is happening concerns all Cameroonians.”

In a counter reaction over the BBC, Government Spokesman, Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary of Communication vehemently refuted the allegation “It is a slanderous description of Cameroon and that has nothing to do with the Cameroon we are living in.”
While making reference to those arrested in Anglophone Cameroon, Minister Issa Tchiroma said, “their rights are being protected; they have a right to receive their Lawyers, they have the right to receive their families, this description does not concern Cameroon at all.”
The Minister stressed that there are no such weekly deaths as claimed by the SDF Member of Parliament.

The Sun Newspaper

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Rita Akana

13.Mar.2017

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