Politics

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 Sure, their working conditions are terrible; School buildings falling apart, outdated didactic materials, morally depraved and unruly students, extremely corrupt school administrators, and even more corrupt bureaucratic officials in their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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The just ended failed Philemon Yang’s Peace Tour has attracted a lot of criticisms from critics and politicians in Cameroon and the diaspora. This is the third time the PM is failing to restore peace in the Anglophone region of Cameroon. In his messages he ceaselessly stressed the fact that parents should send their children to school, a plea that failed before his own very eyes.

 “I thought the struggle shifted from a teacher/lawyer issue to the entire southern Cameroon people's struggle. He is still making it sound like it’s still the teachers’/lawyers’ affair” says a Bamenda critic.
"I learned that the Prime Minister was in the city. He did not invite me it is not by force that teachers and students will return to classrooms. They expected the head of the government to come and talk to them and ask for what they wanted. He did not do that. He came to tell them what to do.This is not the way to go. He should stop ridiculing himself. The Government must engage in frank dialogue" says Ni John Fru Ndi, SDF party Chairman.

This overnight headstrong behaviour of his countrymen seems to reveal that a wrong “medication” was administered to remedy the “ailment”. It also suggests that the government has not been a government for the people and as a result, they are now demanding for the Anglophone problem as a whole to be solved and sending their children to school will not help in solving this.

This may just be an opportunity for the government to re-strategize and organize an open dialogue with Anglophones in a bid to come up with lasting solutions to the Anglophone problem or else it may just be another dawn for a new Anglophone Revolution in Cameroon.

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Rita Akana

13.Mar.2017

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The government of Cameroon, through the Minister of Secondary Education, has prescribed measures for catch-up classes in order to enable students meet up with lessons lost as a result of the Anglophone Teachers’ Trade Unions strike action that started on November 21 last year and has paralysed schools in the Northwest and Southwest Regions.

The measures are contained in press release No 13/17/PR/MINESEC/CAB of March 3, 2017 signed by the Minister of Secondary Education, Jean Ernest Masséna Ngallé Bibehé. Copies were dispatched to the Secretaries General at the Presidency and the Prime Minister’s Office for information, the DECC, GCE Board, OBC, National Secretaries and Education Secretaries.

According to the release, the Minister “informs the National Education Community that following the strike action of teachers in the Northwest and Southwest Regions which, up to 3 February 2017, disrupted the smooth implementation of activities provided for by Order No 6384/B1/1464/MINEDUB/MINESEC of 24 June 2016 fixing the calendar of the 2016/2017 school year in the Republic of Cameroon, notably those relating to pedagogic planning, measures have been taken to make up for lost teaching hours.”

The measures as spelt out by the Minister include: “the continuation of catch-up classes that have been ongoing for some time now in the Francophone section; the increase of 17 hour of teaching per week in the Anglophone section to run from 6 March to 13 May 2017 (and divided as follows: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 2 hours per day; Wednesday: 3 hours; Saturday: 6 hours); two weeks of classes for examination classes and one week for other classes during Easter holidays scheduled from Friday, 31 March to Monday, 17 April 2017.”

The Minister called on all members of the education community to put all hands on deck, in their different spheres of competence, for the full implementation of the measures outlined above.

Cameroonpost

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Rita Akana

12.Mar.2017

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President Biya and the British High Commissioner to Cameroon, H.E John Brian Olley, have discussed the Anglophone crisis for the first time since the conflict erupted in November 2016.

The Anglophone crisis, The Post learnt, is one of the main topics the duo harped on during a tete-a-tete at the Unity Palace on Tuesday March 7.

Nothing has filtered out so far as to what the President and the British diplomat said specifically about the crisis. But, observers hold that Biya and Olley must have bowed their minds on seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The crisis has kept children out of school and lawyers out of court in the two English-speaking regions of the country. The situation has provoked a deepening socio-economic and political crisis in the country. Sweeping arrest and detention of Anglophones have been one of the worst fall-outs of the crisis.

There has been deepening national acrimony as citizens have been warned not to discuss federalism or any idea that has to do with changing the form of the state. To Government, the unitary state remains sacrosanct and is not open to any discussion.

For one thing, the crisis has sparked an upsurge of human rights violations according to human rights watch dog, Amnesty International.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, has also raised an alarm about seven journalists currently being detained in connection to the crisis.

Given the UK’s attachment to the culture of human rights and respect of fundamental freedoms, the British diplomat could not have been indifferent to such a situation. The meeting between the President and the High Commissioner was even more compelling because both Cameroon and the UK are members of the Commonwealth of Nations.

The Commonwealth, also known as the club of gentlemen, usually recommends the strict application of the rule of law and the respect of human rights in crisis situations.

Some observers hold that the UK government has a moral obligation to wade in and help the Government of Cameroon to arrest the conflict because the crisis is in the former British Southern Cameroons.

Britain occupied the territory after the Anglo-French forces defeated Germany in the battle of Nsanakang near Mamfe during the First World War. This historic affiliation with Cameroon alone could have motivated the UK diplomat to see how to contribute his own quota in brokering peace on the issue.

Cameroonpost

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Rita Akana

12.Mar.2017

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