9, December 2022
Amid bitter civil war, Archbishop Andrew Nkea consecrates contested territory to Mary 0
Amid ongoing violence pitting the country’s French-speaking majority against an embittered Anglophone minority, Cameroon’s leading Catholic cleric, Archbishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya, has consecrated the contested Bamenda Episcopal Province to the care of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The province corresponds to the territorial circumscription of the North West and South West regions of Cameroon where a separatist war has been raging for six years. The two English-speaking regions constitute 20 percent of the country’s 27 million people.
For decades, people in the two regions have complained of marginalization from the Francophone-dominated administration in Yaoundé.
The pent-up frustrations reached a head in 2016 when Anglophone teachers and lawyers took to the streets to protest what they considered was the overbearing influence of French on the Anglo-Saxon education and Common Law systems practiced in the two regions.
The central government responded with lethal force. A separatist fringe developed and took up arms to fight for the independence of the two regions.
Amid the resulting violence, at least 6000 people have been killed, more than 700,000 people have been displaced, and an additional 70,000 Cameroonians have found refuge in Nigeria.
While ending the Marian Year and at the same time launching the Year of the Eucharist on December 6,2022, Nkea said it’s only when the entire family of God raise their voices in supplication to Mary that peace can return to the two regions.
“The Blessings of God have come down upon us in abundance,” Nkea told congregants at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Abango as he closed the Marian Year launched in December 2021, while launching the Year of the Eucharist.
“Because all the Bishops of the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda are present in this Shrine today, we have decided that we shall consecrate the entire Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Peace,” Nkea announced.
“We shall appeal for her maternal intercession, so that we can know peace once again in our Church province, which corresponds to the territorial circumscription of the North West and South West regions of Cameroon. This is not our choice. It is not even our decision. It is God Himself who has decided to make it this way.”
Nkea recalled the issues he raised while launching the Marian Year in 2021 during which he dedicated the Bamenda Archdiocese to Marian care.
“Our country has been passing through a lot of difficulties,” Nkea recalls telling Christians back then.
“For the last five years, we have known fighting, killing, destruction of property, and all kinds of evil associated with war. We never knew we could see these things in our country. It is not ending. It is still continuing. Our human intelligence seems to have been blocked while looking for a solution,” Nkea recalls.
Back then, he told Christians in his diocese to raise their voices in unison in prayer for a return to peace, given the incessant killings, rapes, extortions and destruction of property.
He recalled calling on the Christians to not allow “Our Lady to have any rest until peace has come back amongst us and the killings have stopped.”
“Peace must return to Bamenda. Peace must return to our society,” the priest said, to a thunderous ‘Amen’ from the congregation.
“Jesus the Prince of Peace must come back to Cameroon, so that we all can say like the Psalmist, ‘in his days justice shall flourish’…”
He had called on Christians to visit the Marian Shrine every week in prayer and supplication to Mary.
“Our Mother Mary cannot be in Heaven and we her children are suffering on earth. All Catholics are invited to pray the Rosary daily – individually, in groups, in families, in small Christian communities, etc., so that our prayer will rise up to Heaven like one big smoke of incense. She (Mary) must hear us. And Jesus must hear us.”
Nkea said those prayers were bearing fruit, a testament to the presence of all the bishops of the Ecclesiastical Province on November 6 at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.
“We never thought it would be this way,” the cleric said. The crisis had always meant difficulties in travelling, and Nkea implied that for clerics and Christians to have turned out in big numbers at the shrine means that peace was gradually returning to the regions.
“We shall not wait until we have total peace before we come to thank Our Lady for what she has done for us. We have gathered here in Abango to close the Marian Year and to tell Mary: “We thank you… We shall continue our prayers, and we shall continue to use this Shrine, so that our prayers shall not cease to storm the gates of heaven for us to have lasting peace.”
“Why shall we not have peace when Jesus is the Prince of Peace?” he asked. “And Our Blessed Mother Mary is the Queen of Peace?”
“Peace is a gift of God, because God is Peace. He blesses his people with Peace. That is why after the Resurrection, Jesus Christ assured his disciples: Peace I give you. My own peace I give you-A Peace which this world cannot give. Such Peace was only possible because Jesus had reconciled us with God and with one another.”
Nkea said only prayer will grant Cameroon that kind of peace.
Culled from Crux
9, December 2022
Southern Cameroons Crisis: Biya leaves for Washington via Geneva but might face a storm in the US 0
After being held at the Unity Palace for years because of the Southern Cameroons crisis and the global pandemic (Covid-19), Cameroon’s ailing president, Paul Biya, left Yaoundé today for Washington D.C. to attend the US-African Leaders Summit scheduled to take place from 13-15 December 2022.
As usual, Mr. Biya will be stopping over in Geneva, Switzerland, not to condole with Switzerland following the country’s trouncing in the World Cup, but to undergo a special steroid session which will enable him to operate in the highly demanding conference in the American capital.
Over the last decade, Mr. Biya has been surviving on steroids given his poor health. He is currently a colony of diseases which require huge consumption of steroids. According to a source close to the Unity Palace, Mr. has been psychologically depressed in recent times and the trip to the American capital is an opportunity for him to step out of his palace and demonstrate to the world that he is still in charge in Yaoundé.
Before boarding the airplane for Geneva, the Cameroonian dictator made sure that his collaborators had to bow to him like angels do to God. The country’s Prime Minister, Joseph Dion Ngute, who is out of favour with the ruling cabal almost prostrated in front Mr. Biya to demonstrate that he was still very loyal to the man who has been anything but effective when it comes to running the country.
While in Washington, the senile Biya who is suffering from amnesia will meet with the American President in private to seek the North American country’s help in the insurgency which has been playing out in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions for more than six years.
According to some unknown Cameroonian diplomatic enthusiasts like Billy Eko, whose father was arrested with drugs on an airplane more than 35 years ago, Mr. Biya’s ineffective diplomacy seems to be delivering some good results. He based his logic on the indictment of three Southern Cameroonians in the United States on grounds of exporting terror to another country.
The indictment was deposited by the FBI, but in the United States, an indictment is nothing. The three co-accused are not guilty until proven guilty by a legally constituted court of law in the United States. The US is not a country where the president can just order people to be locked up. The law works in the United States, and it is incumbent upon the FBI to prove its case in court.
Currently, the suspects have already lawyered up and there are more celebrity lawyers lining up to join the team of lawyers who want to prove that the problem in Cameroon is not the suspects but a man whose rank incompetence and corruption have left a once prosperous nation in the depth of abject poverty, creating massive pockets of opposition in the country.
There is also a fundraising campaign in the United States for the three Southern Cameroonians to enable them to hire the best international lawyers who can easily prove that the Yaounde regime clearly belongs to the past and if a regime change is not engineered, more people will be sent to an early grave.
Lawyers in the United States have already gathered lots of video and cable communications evidence between Cameroon’s military officials who intentionally planned a massive genocide in the two English-speaking regions of the country. The lawyers have enough evidence. Videos of Ngarbuh, Kwakwa, and Muyenge as well as multiple reports by the International Crisis Group have been shared with American Senators who are urging Joe Biden not to receive Mr. Biya who is now seen as Cameroon’s “merchant of death”.
The Senators hold that if the US identifies with a man who has mowed down his own people, it will be calling into question its claim that it is a beacon of hope and democracy. Biya is no democrat! He is an iron fist in a velvet glove. It is hard to weave his name and democracy in the same sentence, an American human rights activist said.
Currently, there is a massive demonstration being organized to receive the dictator in Washington. Southern Cameroonians want to prove to the Biden Administration that it is having political intercourse with a murderer, a man who has killed many women and children in Southern Cameroons, and still has thousands of Southern Cameroonians in East Cameroonian jails.
Mr. Biya is also being blamed by his fellow compatriots for corruption, financial impropriety, and incompetence. Since coming to power in 1982, Mr. Biya has transformed the country into a one-man show, where his word is the law.
By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai