Cameroon President Paul Biya says the government will increase funding to grow more wheat after protests over wheat shortages and price spikes sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before Russia’s Black Sea blockade, Cameroon imported 60 percent of its wheat from Ukraine. The cut-off has led to a nearly 50 percent increase in the price of bread.

Cameroon government says President Paul Biya on Monday ordered an immediate disbursement of over $15 million to grow wheat in the central African state.

Cameroon’s agriculture minister, Gabriel Mbairobe, says Biya responded to pleas from civilians that the cost of living is becoming very high, and many Cameroonians are finding it very difficult to put food on the table.

Mbairobe says Russia’s war in Ukraine has completely disrupted supply chains of consumer goods, especially wheat, which is the main staple food in Cameroon. He says investing in wheat production is a wise decision because each Cameroonian consumes 33 kilograms of wheat each year which is far more than 23 kilograms of rice each Cameroonian eats annually. He says wheat can be grown in several places in Cameroon.

The government says Cameroon produces less than one-fourth of the 1.6 million tons of wheat it needs each year. Last year, the government imported more than 850,000 tons from Russia and Ukraine. Now, according to the Cameroon Importers Union, up to 25,000 tons have been imported since January 2022.

Mbairobe says while the nation waits for its own newly planted wheat to be harvested before the end of the year, local substitutes like sweet potato, cassava and yams should replace the wheat Cameroon imports from Russia and Ukraine.

Cameroon says while baking bread, backers should replace imported wheat with local substitutes such as cassava, yams and potato.

Biya’s instructions for more than $15 million to be invested to grow more wheat comes after several weeks of nationwide protest against cereal shortages. The shortage of wheat has led to a close to 50 percent increase in the price of bread.

Delor Magellan Kamseu Kamgaing, the president of Cameroon’s Consumers League, says his league organized the protests to force the government to take immediate actions that will reduce growing hunger and anger among civilians.

Kamgaing says after COVID-19, Russia’s war in Ukraine is leading to severe food shortages and unprecedented hikes in the prices of imported staple foods like cereals. He says people are hungry and unable to afford bread which is consumed by a majority of households in Cameroon. Kamgaing says the government should dialogue with its citizens and take measures that will stop a looming famine.

Kamgaing said the government should provide fertilizers and subsidies to local farmers to increase plantain, rice, yam and cassava production.

Kamgaing said the war in Ukraine though causing sufferings, should provide an opportunity for Cameroon to invest in its local industries and stop over dependency on imports.

The government says the money ordered by Biya will either be used in buying fertilizers or paid out as subsidies to wheat farmers. Some of the money will be used to purchase tractors.

The U.N. reports that 1.7 billion people in 107 economies including 41 African countries are exposed to either rising food prices, rising energy prices or tightening financial conditions as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Source: VOA

Cameroon’s government has called for emergency food support for more than two million people facing hunger along its northern borders with Chad and Nigeria. At a crisis meeting Monday in Yaoundé, authorities blamed natural disasters, insecurity, and intercommunal clashes in part for causing the food shortage in the nation of 26.5 million people.

Agriculture Minister Gabriel Mbairobe said floods and elephants have devastated several hundred hectares of farmland, poultry farms and crops, and killed an unknown number of cattle, sheep and goats within the past six months.

Mbairobe also said devastating migratory caterpillars, crickets and weaver birds have decimated thousands of hectares of farmland in Cameroon, especially on the border with Chad and Nigeria. He said close to 300,000 people find themselves in extreme or emergency food insufficiency situations and 2.6 million people are not certain they will have a meal each day.

Food insecurity is threatening the lives of 6 million Cameroonians, Mbairobe said.

Speaking in Yaounde on Monday during the crisis meeting, Mbairobe said most poor civilians threatened by food insecurity find it difficult to cope with rising prices caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The Cameroonian government blames the war for a 15 to 30 percent increase in the price of staple food items, especially wheat, maize, sorghum and rice widely consumed in areas along the northern border with Nigeria and Chad.

Cameroon relies on Ukraine for 60 percent of its wheat imports. The war has caused the price of a 50-kilogram bag of wheat to climb from $35 to $60, an amount the government says a majority of the hungry people cannot afford.

Ephraim Chi, who owns a maize plantation in Pousse, a town on the border with Chad, said unpredictable weather conditions and changing climate patterns make it difficult for farmers to know when to plant.

“At times we will go for a long time without rain and at times the rains will become intense, so farmers are now confused when to actually plant their crops and that is why we have a lot of poor yields now,” he said. “People are cutting a lot of trees and these trees regulate the climate. When the soil is so dry because we have cut down a lot of trees, the catchments (water collections) dry up.”

Chi blamed civilians for cutting down trees for firewood and logging companies for what he said is their attitude to destroy the environment.

Cameroonian officials say more than 40,000 people, a majority of them cattle ranchers, farmers and fishers, plan to return to the border region despite fleeing December 2021 bloody clashes over water resources.

The government has not said how much it needs to reduce the food crisis, but that it is in negotiations with funding agencies and friendly countries.

Last week, Japan’s government donated $1.2 million to the World Food Program to assist vulnerable persons, including those threatened by hunger in Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic.

In a food analysis in April, the World Food Program said staple food prices, early depletion of household food stocks, and declining incomes from reduced crop sales limit food access for poor Cameroonian households amid low levels of humanitarian assistance.

The report says the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency in northern Cameroon and clashes between government forces and separatist fighters in the Northwest and Southwest regions continue to negatively affect the livelihoods of populations and drive high numbers of acutely food insecure persons. The separatists are seeking to carve out an independent English-speaking region from the rest of the French-speaking country.

Source: VOA

At least 13 people have died after a truck collided with a bus in southwestern Cameroon, according to local police.

The accident occurred Saturday morning along Kumba-Muyuka highway in Southwest region of the country.

The truck lost control and collided head-on with a bus that was carrying 30 passengers at a locality called Bombe Bakundu which is located along the highway, police said.

Several people were injured and rushed to a local hospital, according to officials.

According to the police, fatal accidents are common in Cameroon due to reckless driving, dangerous overtaking, drunk driving and poor state of road.

The Ministry of Transport estimates that 1,500 people die in road accidents each year in the central African nation.

Source: Xinhaunet

An authoritative French newspaper Nouvel Observateur has reported that members of President Paul Biya’s family have spent more than three billion FCFA to buy luxury homes in Paris, Monaco and in different locations in France.

An investigative report published on Thursday, July 7, 2022 entitled “Luxury real estate: how France attracts the dubious money from around the world,” Nouvel Observateur revealed that Franck Emmanuel Biya and Chantal Biya respectively the eldest son and wife of the President of the Republic of Cameroon, are among sixty dubious persons who have invested hundreds of millions of Euros in France to buy houses and luxury apartments- a phenomenon on which there are strong suspicion of money laundering.

Five investigative French journalists who wrote the report stated that Franck Biya bought a luxury house near the principality of Monaco for nearly three million Euros in 2004 when he was aged 33.

Nouvel Observateur noted that the Franck Biya house has a swimming pool and it is located in a popular private estate at Cap-Martin, not far from Monaco.  When French authorities asked him how he raised the money for the purchase, he did not answer.

The French paper also reported that Chantal Biya, the first lady owns three apartments in different locations in France.

The newspaper article also revealed that Chantal Biya is too extravagant evidenced by how much she spends on her hairstyles and her flashy stays in Geneva with President Biya.

The French journalists opined that Chantal Biya has never worked but registered a company in France that she used in spending more than 2 million Euros to buy three apartments in the 16th district of Paris, Levallois-Perret and in Nice between 1997 and 2009 – two of which were paid in cash and the third financed by a loan from BNP.

The first lady acquired the houses through a Cameroonian Senator, Pierre François-Xavier Menye Ondo, who is also a notary and a business partner, with only 1% share in two of the three purchases.

A leading French lawyer, William Bourdon quoted in the report said “From Saint-Tropez to the 16th district of Paris and from Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to Montfort-l’Amaury, 62 people including Franck and Chantal Biya have spent, between 1985 and 2020, more than 744 million Euros to buy real estate in France”.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with files

Flash floods triggered by sudden rains swept through the Likomba-Mutengene main road in Fako Division in the early hours of Saturday. The Saturday disaster came with no warning.

“The local Likomba River was flooding with massive boulders. The trees were falling! It was terrifying” Cameroon Concord News Buea Bureau Chief said.

Likomba and Mutengene are in the mountainous Fako Division, where deadly cascade of rock, debris and water regularly wreak havoc.

Many are attempting to understand what caused the avalanche. But the massive flooding illustrates the risks of development in an area vulnerable to the accelerated effects of climate change.

An Environmentalist contacted by Cameroon Concord News say the construction of houses and building development works all over Fako Division have put the inhabitants in a precarious position.

Cameroon government military, paramilitary and police as well as disaster management officials were conspicuously absent as passengers in vehicles dug through mud, sand and rocks that swamped the Likomba-Mutengene road. Several passenger vehicles were on the road when the rains struck.

By Toto Roland Motuba

Cameroon Concord News Group office in Yaoundé has revealed that the Francophone dominated military forces arrested some 5000 Southern Cameroons teenagers amid continued aggression against Ambazonia Self Defense Forces.

Concord’s Yaoundé Bureau Chief Rita Akana wrote in a write up  that there were minors as young as 16 among the detainees.

Many of the children were arrested when Cameroon government soldiers raided towns and villages across the South West and North West Regions.

“The Biya regime is so wicked,  devilish and occultic so much that they have over 5000 boys and girls of average age of 18 years in prisons for as flimsy as lack of ID cards” Rita Akana said.

 “Most of these juveniles are mercilessly abused by regime officers as sex slave” She furthered.

Cameroon Concord News Group understands that the teenagers are being held under the practice of administrative detention, which allows Yaoundé to keep detainees behind bars without charge for an indefinite time.

Eyong Ndip, an 18-year-old boy from Mautu, told Rita Akana that he was savagely beaten when Cameroon government soldiers arrested him near his house.

Sama Peter said a group of French speaking army soldiers had chased and caught him before they assaulted him with the butts of their rifles, stomped on him with military boots, and left him bleeding from his nose in Widikum.

At the very beginning of the crisis in Southern Cameroons, French speaking gendarmerie officers detained and assaulted 17-year-old Njuma Collins and his mum at Ekondo Titi.  The Francophone soldiers pepper-sprayed and violently beat Njuma calling him “young Amba fighter”. Njuma Collins sustained injuries to his face, back, and feet.

There is a growing trend of Francophone army soldiers shooting and injuring young English speaking Cameroonian men, especially in the knee and the leg, during overnight raids across the entire Southern Cameroons.

The Vice President of the Ambazonia Interim Government Dabney Yerima recently confirmed that Cameroon government soldiers had detained 5000 children since the beginning of the war in Southern Cameroons.

According to the Ambazonia Interim Government, several Southern Cameroons minors are currently being held in New Bell and Kondengui prisons including detention centers in French Cameroun.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with files

The Cameroonian authorities must ensure that human rights defenders are able to work free of intimidation and reprisals, Amnesty International said today after receiving reports that activists are being targeted with death threats for exposing human rights violations and abuses in Anglophone regions.

The individuals targeted include seven human rights defenders and a cyber-activist, all of whom had been documenting human rights violations and abuses in the English-speaking regions of North-West and South-West Cameroon, which are facing clashes between army forces and armed separatist groups.

“The authorities must urgently launch a thorough, independent and effective investigation into these threats and other abuses committed against human rights defenders”.

Unrelenting death threats

Akem Kelvin Nkwain, a human rights officer at the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA), an organization that has documented human rights violations and abuses by all parties to the conflict, told Amnesty International he received several death threats from alleged armed separatists.

The first threat came on 24 May 2022, shortly after Nkwain wrote on Twitter about a child killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) allegedly planted by separatist fighters in Kumbo in North-West Cameroon.

On 16 June 2022, he received calls and messages featuring photos of a captured policeman, dead civilians, bullets, guns, armed group members, and an image of himself being marked for killing.

One of the messages said: “We declare you and your whole entire family as traitors and enemies to the Ambazonian fighters. Until we reach your house, let that money bring you back to life when you get shot and kill.”

Felix Agbor Nkongho, a human rights lawyer and founder of the CHRDA, also received multiple death threats from alleged armed separatists by phone and on social media in reaction to his participation in a conference in Toronto organized by the Coalition for Dialogue and Negotiations, a US-based NGO focusing on the conflict in Cameroon, between 29 October and 1 November 2021.

Abductions

On 22 April 2022, four UN Special Rapporteurs focusing on human rights defenders, extrajudicial executions, the right to freedom of expression and the right to association, wrote to President Paul Biya raising concern over repeated death threats sent since 2015 to the president and the lawyer of the Organic Farming for Gorillas (OFFGO). OFFGO has exposed abuses by businesses in the North-West regions of Cameroon.

In May 2021, the lawyer received death threats by phone, and on 6 November 2021, he escaped an abduction attempt at his home in Bamenda. He was also reportedly abducted from his home and released two hours later on 19 February 2019. In a report released in January 2021, Final warning: death threats and killings of human rights defenders,the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders detailed the threats against him.

In addition, his brother was also abducted and tortured on 16 May 2019 and on 27 March 2020 as a way to intimidate him. His brother-in-law was also shot twice in the leg by unknow individuals in his presence.  Several complaints have been filed in previous years by OFFGO lawyer, but according to OFFGO officials, the authorities have failed to launch an investigation.

In May 2022, N’Zui Manto,a cyber-activist working from outside Cameroon was forced to leave the African country where he was living after the Cameroonian authorities identified him following information shared by the local police that raised fears of repatriation.

N’Zui MantotoldAmnesty International he started receiving death threats on social media at the beginning of 2019 since he publishes information about the Cameroonian army’s losses in Anglophone regions. On 28 May 2022, he received a message from a fake Facebook profile saying: “One day you will come across me. I will kill you like nothing.”

Tarnteh Amadu Ngangpanweh,a human rights defender for Conscience Africaine, a Cameroon-based NGO, told Amnesty International he began receiving death threats after attending a press conference in Yaoundé on 18 May 2020. The event, which was organized by a coalition of civil society organizations, shared findings from a report on the Ngarbuh massacre, in which more than 20 civilians were killed during a military operation on 13 and 14 February 2020.

Two days later, after Tarnteh published the report on Facebook, an unknown person messaged him on Facebook saying he “better stop such activities, because this is obviously the first and last time, I am warning you on conspiring to publish false information, the next time you will be sorry for yourself.”

Tarnteh received several other threatening calls in late 2020, July 2021 and December 2021 after he documented alleged detentions for ransom by security forces in North-West region, and after he published a report on abductions allegedly committed by armed separatists.

Culled from Amnesty International

The Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government (IG) says Ambazonia Self Defense Groups will soon deliver a shocking response to the ongoing French Cameroun military operations in Manyu and Ndian County as they constitute a flagrant violation of Southern Cameroons sovereignty.

Dabney Yerima told the Southern Cameroons war cabinet late on Sunday that Amba fighters will give a crushing response to Yaoundé within the next few weeks in Manyu, Ndian and Lebialem.

Yerima said the IG can no longer stand idly by in the face of attacks and violations carried out against the people of Southern Cameroons in Mamfe, Mundemba and Fontem.

Dabney Yerima went on to say that most Francophone military commanders deployed to Southern Cameroons by the Biya regime have created fake armed groups and are using them to terrorize the local population.   

The Southern Cameroons exiled leader highlighted the nasty role currently being played by the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church and sounded a note of caution to Southern Cameroons clerics to continue to be prophetic voices of the suffering people.

By Enowtaku Ebanghatabi Christelle

Francis Ngannou has shared some disturbing visuals detailing the inhumane treatment of the people from his homeland, Cameroon.

Francis Ngannou, who was born and raised in Cameroon, himself migrated to Europe at the age of 26. However, he was arrested and handed a two-month jail term for illegally crossing into Spain.

After serving the term, Ngannou entered France. He subsequently met MMA Factory head coach Fernand Lopez in Paris, who helped him start his MMA career. Ngannou soon scaled great heights of success and reached the pinnacle of the sport, winning the coveted UFC heavyweight title.

Source: Sportskeeda

The International Monetary Fund announced on Wednesday that its staff had come to an agreement with Cameroon regarding the second review of its loan programmes. If the Executive Board of the Fund approves, the agreement could result in the disbursement of $73.6 million.

According to the Fund, Cameroon’s economic outlook is still favourable, with growth of 3.8% predicted for 2022, but uncertainties are growing as a result of high rises in the cost of food, fertiliser, and oil due to the conflict in Ukraine.