Politics

The security situation in the Far North region remains of concern. Despite the security measures taken by the Cameroonian authorities to prevent Boko Haram’s attacks, the Islamist sect continues to perpetrate raids in the border areas of Cameroon. The Logone et Chari and Mayo Sava Divisions were particularly targeted resulting in killings, lootings and cattle robbery.

On the other side of the border, the Nigerian army continues to strike bases occupied by Boko Haram. Thus on September 13, a total of 194 Nigerian refugees (139 children, 36 women and 19 men), coming from Djakoua, a Nigerian village belonging to the town of Bama, arrived in the town of Kerawa in Mayo Sava Department.

Held captive by elements of Boko Haram since 2014, these newcomers have escaped after their place of captivity had been bombed by the Nigerian army. As other new arrivals, these refugees lack personal identity documents, are in urgent need of shelter, access to drinking water and basic health care as well as food and non-food items (mat, kitchen utensils, jerry cans, blankets etc.).

Due the considerable number of refugees that Cameroon is hosting, President Paul Biya was invited to the Leader’s Summit on refugees and migrants organized by US-President Obama at the margins of the 71st UN General Assembly. In his intervention, the Head of State of Cameroon reiterated the commitment of his country to continue its policy of hospitality and solidarity towards refugees.

He also appealed to the international community to step-up support to countries dealing with large and protracted refugee situations, including Cameroon. The President furthermore emphasized the strong engagement of UNHCR and its partners in reinforcing basic services in refugee hosting areas and underlined the importance of the recently signed convention between the Ministry of Public Health and UNHCR, which guarantees refugees UNHCR Factsheet | Cameroon | September 2016 access to public health services, and applauded the efforts underway to deliver refugee identity cards after biometric verification.

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Rita Akana

07.Oct.2016

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After announcing in August 2013 the relocation of the project for the construction of the deep water port of Limbé, from the Ngeme site to Isonge, the State of Cameroon has come back to the initial option, “after assessing several hypotheses”, reveals a report just made public by the National Port Authority (APN).

At the time, the then-Minister of Economy, Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi, had justified the relocation of this project by the narrowness of the Ngeme site, and above all, the costs linked to the payment of compensations. Indeed, he specified during a site visit, in addition to being bigger, the Isonge site is almost uninhabited, is close to the site hosting the project for the construction of the Afko Cement factory, and has a depth of 17m, thus 2m more than the Ngeme site, which would enable bigger vessels to berth.

All these particularities of the Isonge site, whih were then presented as advantages for the implementation of the project, are finally brushed aside since, according to APN’s revelations, it is finally in Ngeme that the deep water port of Limbé will be built. We can however note that these hesitations on the site meant to host the project considerably slowed down the start of the works.

As a reminder, it was on 1 November 2013 that the Cameroonian government signed an agreement with the Cameroonian-Korean consortium called Limbe Port Industrial Development Corporation (LIPID), for the construction of the deep water port of Limbé, in the South-West region of the country. This infrastructure, which should cost no less than FCfa 300 billion, according to updated estimates, should be delivered in 2018.

With the 2-year delay in the implementation of this project, and in order to make the deep water port of Limbé quickly operational, LIPID “proposed to the Cameroonian government to start with the construction of multifunctional floating pier, with the capacity of berthing 20,000-ton vessels, whose cost is estimated at approximately USD 35 million (FCfa 17.5 billion)”, the government had announced at the end of a meeting held on 15 January 2015 in Yaoundé.

Nine months later, this floating terminal, which according to the timeline presented in January 2015 by LIPID, “could be built and delivered in six months”, is still expected. Likewise for the other components of this port, which “will be specialised in the transport of heavy products such as hydrocarbons (the only refinery of the country is located in Limbé), cement (a cement factory will be built in the town of Limbé), containers and other agricultural products (CDC operates thousands of hectares of banana, palm oil and rubber tree around Limbé)”, the Cameroonian government specified.

BIC

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Rita Akana

07.Oct.2016

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Late Professor Bole N Butake is among the group of young Cameroon intellectuals who got to Yaounde some time after independence - as big university boys.

 In his case, he really had to drudge hard at every turn, given that he was an orphan of both parents, and had managed to go through his pre-university education studies thanks to the charity of benefactors, who had been rightly convinced to have seen him a very intelligent and focused young man.

 From his St Patrick Primary School Nkor, through SAHECO to CCAST Bambili, the young Butake was a bubble of mettle and teeming potential. By tye time he got to the Yaounde university, freshman's proclivity for letters was already evident. His creative streak first came to light especially as a post-graduate student, with the founding and managing of The Mould magazine in 1976; thus would serve as the creative magazine of the then Faculty of Letters, Arts and Foreign Languages for long.

 Butake's initial love was poetry as his many poems in the copies of this mag showed & he was editor while it lasted and came to feature many who later became writers: the Ndumbe Eyohs, the Kitts Mbebohs, the Nalova Lyongas, the Edward Akos, the Tala Kashims, the Tangyie Suh-Nfors, the Tah Protuses, the Bumuh Martins,etc. Even masters like the eminent Bernard Fonlon of blessed memory, who trained them to be writers and critics, as he loved to put it,like the Prof Ze Amvelas, etc, published in that famous mag.

 Prof Butake would later study in Leeds University,after which he became a full time university don in UNIYAO - not yet the splintered I and II. With his peers the likes of late Lambo, late Siga Asanga, late Mbeboh, Lyonga, Futcha, late Jikong Stephen, late Ebot, late Tambi Jot, Alobwede d'Epie, etc and under the mentorship of their venerable Professor Fonlon and his co- professors, the late Butake was among the first group of Cameroonian teachers recruited to man the English Dep't. He would later on move to the African Literature Department, where he made a name as theatre guru and playwright and established an enviable reputation with peers the likes of late Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh, Gilbert Doho,etc.

It was sometime in 1984, after a creative writers' training course which he attended in Iowa in the US of A that Bole Butake abandoned his first love, poetry, to adopt drama, especially drama for "conscientisation" and social awareness. He retired from the Faculty of Arts, Letters and Human Sciences in 2012 and was given a rousing send-off from that dep't that spanned 2 days, 14/06/2012 & 15/06/2012, with testimonies from the likes of Prof Breitinger from Bayreuth Germany, Prof Odhiambo from Moi University Kenya and the cream of the Cameroon intelligentsia.

 He leaves behind a rich legacy of plays: The Rape of Michelle; Lake God; The Survivors; And Palm Wine Will Flow; Shoes and Four Men in Arms; Dance of the Vampires; Family Saga; Bethrotal Without Libation; Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon (coauthored with Gilbert Doho)

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Valentine Nfon Tameh

03.Oct.2016

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Democracy in Africa has often been criticized as being a facade put up to receive funding from foreign governments. But for experts, democracy exists even at grassroots levels.

Autocratic or authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, have been a dominant form of governance in Africa for many years. In the second decade of the 21st century, one concern is that they may hinder the attainment of one of the UN's crucial Sustainable Development Goals.

The growth in the number of migrants from Africa poses a challenge outside the continent. Africa must help resolve this challenge by implementing universally acceptable standards of democratic governance. But Robtel Neajai Pailey, a senior researcher from Liberian at Oxford University, rejects the notion of  universal standards of democracy. "There are different strands of democracy so it depends on how you define democracy and who is defining it,” she told DW.

Democracy and Africa

There have been concerns that democratization is not happening fast enough in the continent. But Julia Leininger, an expert on African Politics from the German Development Institute (Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik)  says there is plenty of evidence of democracy in action at the grassroots level in Africa. "You find a lot of practices in the sense that people discuss things a lot in order to get to conclusions and joint decisions. There is a lot of what we call vertical accountabilities," she said. But she agrees there is still a long way to go

Poor governance and leadership is big to development in Africa. The 16th of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals seeks to address problem by striving for "access to justice for all and moves to build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels of government."

One hurdle to "effective,a ccountable and inclusive institutions" is the tendency of some African presidents to try and  extend their number of terms in office by sidestepping or tempering with their country's constitution. Congo-Brazzaville, DR Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and Burkina Faso have all experienced this .

Professor Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, the executive director at Ghana Center for Democratic Development, told DW that Africans do not support extended presidential terms. These are the findings of Afro-barometer, a pan-African, research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions.

"Africans do prefer democracy to any other form of government. We asked them about elections. Sometimes elections bring too many problems so may be we shouldn't have elections, They said no. As many as 8 in 10 Africans consistently say they want to have multiparty elections,” he said.

The presence of democratic spaces in some African countries has helped civil rights groups to push for institutional change and policy development. But Pailey said this is only half the battle. "I think there are really fantastic policies on the continent of Africa. The problem is their implementation,” she said.

The problem is not exclusive to her home country of Liberia, it is also rife on other parts of the continent. "Unless there is a political will and a demand for that political will to be met in terms of the implementation of really fantastic laws and regulation then we will still be talking about SDG 16 maybe a 100 years from now,” she said.

Resolutions

So what can be done to achieve these goals by their set date of 2030 ? The international reaction to autocratic governments is normally to impose sanctions, one example being Zimbabwe. But such sanctions do not do enough to ensure that governments become more accountable to their citizens. 

Pailey says  a lot of development cooperation institutions fund government bodies that they know are not accountable to their citizens. "That is actually really damning for European development cooperation institutions,” she said.

Supporters of autocratic regimes point to the case of  President Kagame's Rwanda, which they say has made big strides in economic, social and environmental development. Is autocratic government not a viable model after all? 

Gyimah-Boadi vehemently challenges this assertion. One should not forget, he said, that  autocratic rule was the norm in Africa from 1960 until at least 1990. "Now why is it that 30 years of authoritarian and autocratic rule in Africa did not produce the kind of developments we are seeing in Rwanda?" The experience of one country cannot be allowed to override that gleaned by 52 countries, he said   

Gyimah-Boadi believes the European Union is losing the knack of dealing with autocratic regimes. This is because they preside over valubale commodities which are highly sought after by other non-European trading partners such China, India or Brazil.

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Wanjiku Mwaura

03.Oct.2016

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Up to 80,000 children will die in northeastern Nigeria without much-needed humanitarian assistance, a senior UN official said. Boko Haram's insurgency has left tens of thousands dead, and millions more displaced.

UN Assistant Secretary-General Toby Lanzer on Friday said that without further assistance, northern Nigeria and surrounding areas impacted by the Boko Haram militant group's onslaught will become the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

"If we don't engage in a much more comprehensive manner, including scaling up our emergency relief programs, what awaits us down the line is the biggest crisis facing any of us, anywhere," said Lanzer, who heads the UN's humanitarian division in the Sahel region.

The militant group's seven-year insurgency, aimed at establishing a so-called caliphate, has left at least 20,000 people dead and displaced more than 2.5 million people in the region.  

The death toll is likely higher due to consequences of the conflict, including fatalities caused by severe malnutrition and lack of access to medical supplies.

'Anywhere except that of Syria'

The UN has requested $739 million (657 million euros) to provide much-needed humanitarian assistance. Lanzer appealed for the funds to protect at-risk populations.

However, UN authorities have received about $197 million, well below commitments from governments and international organizations.

"We're now talking about 568,000 across the Lake Chad basis who are severely malnourished, 400,000 of them are in the northeast of Nigeria," Lanzer said.

"We know that over the next 12 months, 75,000 - maybe as many as 80,000 - children will die in the northeast of Nigeria, unless we can reach them with specialized therapeutic food," the UN official added.

Nigeria's armed forces have pushed the militant group out of several of its strongholds, allowing humanitarian workers to access some affected areas, which Lanzer described as a catastrophe unrivalled "anywhere except that of Syria."

More than 6 million people are described as "severely food insecure" across the Lake Chad region, according to UN figures.

DW

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Rita Akana

02.Oct.2016

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Prince Nfor Hanson

02.Oct.2016

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