Cat-calls have greeted Dr. Barrister Felix Agbor Nkongho’s published reaction on the abduction of Retired Justice Mbeng Martin in Ewelle village in the Manyu County and we in Western Europe believe and fervently too that  he got it all wrong. Barrister Agbor Balla’s arrogant write-up sparked outrage and even some pro Yaoundé supporters were aghast at his bid to blame the suppression of freedom of speech on the Ambazonian freedom fighters.

The retired judge has always been apolitical and has never ever expressed an opinion on the Cameroon political story including the Southern Cameroons revolution. Consequently, there is more to his abduction than Mr. Agbor Felix claims to know. As Barrister Felix Nkongho tries to come back into the Southern Cameroons lime light, the action taken by Ambazonians that forced a TV channel in Kenya to cancel an interview they had with him reveals Southern Cameroonians and Barrister Agbor Balla are no longer an item.

Agbor Balla claimed that by abducting Justice Mbeng, the perpetrators were “Suppressing freedom of speech, association and attacking others with different views do not represent the values we ought to build.” The man of law added that “We must not be bullied into silence through the barrel of a gun by armed groups.”   It is evidently clear that Barrister Agbor Nkongho is seeking for notice and merely speaking for himself. Correspondingly, he is close to two years behind West Cameroon leadership. To be sure, his ill-advised reaction has instead endangered the life of Justice Mbeng Martin.

The press release on Justice Mbeng Martin shows how out of touch Barrister Agbor Balla is with the mood of the Southern Cameroons nation.  Far from wanting to score political concessions, the overwhelming majority of Southern Cameroonians want separation from French Cameroun and for the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia to get on with making a success of the divorce process.

Sessekou Isong Ashu

London, UK

Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), the country’s ruling party has swept an overwhelming majority of seats in the senate after the March 25 polls.

According to official results from the elections body, ELECAM, CPDM won 63 out of the 70 seats available. The remaining seven seats went to the main opposition, Social Democratic Front (SDF).

CPDM won in nine out of the ten regions of the central African country with the SDFwinning only in one of the Anglophone regions – the North West. Seven other parties failed to win a seat.

Cameroon’s parliamentary system caters for 100 senators out of which 70 are to be elected by municipal councillors across the country. The remaining 30 slots are the prerogative of the president.

 The senatorial elections marks the start of a busy electoral calender as it is set to be followed by council, legislative and presidential elections later this year. The respective dates are yet to be determined by the President.

President Paul Biya is expected to seek another term in office after over three decades in charge. The country is currently riled by secessionist elements in the Anglophone regions – northwest and southwest regions.

The secessionists have entered an armed phase of a struggle for independence. About twenty five security forces have so far been killed in guerilla style attacks. Government received over 40 separatist members deported from Nigeria, they included leader Sisuku Julius Ayuk Tabe.

Culled from Africa News

Skepticism dominates Cameroon’s English-speaking areas, even after the visit of the newly appointed Interior Minister Paul Atanga Nji. The minister visited Buea and Kumba in the South-West, as well as Bamenda and Batibo, two sub-regions in northwestern Cameroon.

The minister had said on Tuesday that he was bringing a “message of dialogue” to the restive southwest anglophone region, where the army is fighting separatists.

Atanga Nji, himself an anglophone, told state radio he was in the region to “bring a message of dialogue, a responsible dialogue, a dialogue with those who know that Cameroon is one and indivisible”.

But his visit has been met with skepticism, with some terming his mission as a ‘joke’ and an ‘illusion’ as RFI reports.

“He did not try to meet us and he talks about dialogue! But which dialogue is it,” RFI quotes an exasperated lawyer from Buea who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“He was content to see the traditional chiefs,” said a bitter teacher, who preferred to take refuge in his village because of the tension in Bamenda.

“Tension is brewing because we are approaching the presidential election and in fact, the government is doing nothing to resolve the crisis, “he continues.

The minister, the first anglophone Interior Minister, is unpopular in the English-speaking regions after declaring in early 2016 that there was “no anglophone problem” in Cameroon.

Two English-speaking regions, in the southwest and northwest, became part of the French-majority country after independence in 1960 and contain around 20 percent of the Cameroon population.

Tensions have flared since separatists proclaimed the autonomous republic of “Ambazonia” in October last year.

The country has had a tortuous colonial history that saw it pass from German rule to French and British hands, and the anglophone minority complain of having long been marginalised by the French-speaking elite.

The conflict between rebels and the army has become increasingly serious, as separatists urge the armed forces and government officials to leave the territory.

New separatist groups are emerging, while the Yaounde authorities have reduced their communications about the conflict to a minimum.

The unrest in the anglophone regions has prompted around 33,000 people to flee to neighbouring Nigeria.

Culled from Africa News

Cameroon’s main opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF) wants recently held Senatorial elections cancelled in the entire South West region of the country. Local media reports indicate that the party on Wednesday filed petition at the Constitutional Court to that effect.

The SDF tabled claims of fraud particularly in the town of Lebialem and incidents of attacks that marred the process in Bangem. The South West region along with the North West make up the Anglophone regions of the country. They have been riled by violence since October 2017 when separatists groups under the so-called Ambazonia Republic attempted to declare independence.

The two regions have been under curfew as a result of attacks on members of the security forces. Separatists under the banner of the Ambazonia Defense Force (ADF) have killed over twenty security forces in guerilla style attacks.

Security in the two regions has been the major issue with the series of polls that lie ahead for the country. The Senatorial polls of March 25 were the first in a multi-election year for the Central African country.

Cameroon’s parliamentary system caters for 100 senators out of which 70 are to be elected by municipal councillors across the country. The remaining 30 slots are the prerogative of the president.

The Senate polls will be followed by council, legislative and presidential elections later this year. The respective dates are yet to be determined by the President.

Source: Africa News

Keeping them Honest:

Don’t step foot in Ambazonia, France warns its citizens. After the US embassy issued a travel advisory warning its citizens against travelling to the Anglophone regions because of the degenerating security situation, the French ambassador to Yde, Gilles Thibault has issued a travel ban on the embassy website, advising French citizens to avoid any travel to Ambazonia, saying they are potential kidnap targets.

Now that France has come to realize the obvious; would the French pressure Biya to come to the negotiation table?

By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai

Cameroon’s President Paul Biya has been in power for 35 years. But while his longevity in office is a talking point at home, the time he spends out of the country has stirred international comment – as Paul Melly, an associate fellow of Chatham House, explains.

Criticised by some for a supposedly “hands-off” style of rule, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya recently held a cabinet meeting for the first time in more than two years.

Presidential elections are scheduled for October and Cameroonians are waiting to hear if the 85-year-old will seek a further term. But no such announcement was made at the meeting.

Mr Biya has been in power since 1982, making him one of Africa’s longest serving leaders. Under his rule, Cameroon has survived an economic crisis and moved from being a one-party state to multi-party politics.

But it has also been marked by endemic corruption and reversal of democratic gains, leading to the abolition of term limits in 2008, which allowed the octogenarian to run for re-election in 2011.

Image copyrightAFP

Today’s Africa is changing. The era of decades-old presidencies is slipping away. Satellite TV and the internet tell a growing urban audience about democratic changes of power in other sub-Saharan countries.

Some 60% of Cameroonians are under 25 and so were not even born when President Biya first came to power. There is massive demand for jobs and viable livelihoods.

The opposition Social Democratic Front has now recognised these generational realities. Earlier this year, the party’s leader, John Fru Ndi, 76, stepped aside to make way for a new presidential candidate, 49-year-old businessman and former pilot Joshua Osih.

Swiss hotel

This is the challenge that confronts Mr Biya as he decides whether to stand for a further term that could take him into a fourth decade in power in a country hungry for change.

His repeated absences from the country have riled critics.

His foreign travels have been the subject of an online spat between the state-owned Cameroon Tribune newspaper and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which calculated the amount of time the president spent abroad using reports from the daily newspaper.

The OCCRP estimates that the president spent nearly 60 days out of the country last year on private visits.

It also alleges that he spent a third of the year abroad in 2006 and 2009. The Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva is said to be his favourite destination.

The state-owned Cameroon Tribune called their investigation “a clear electoral propaganda”.

Image copyrightAFP

Back home, President Biya adopts a low-key style, staying out of the limelight and sometimes retreating to his home village.

He entrusts the day-to-day running of the government to the Prime Minister, Philemon Yang, who holds monthly gatherings of a “cabinet council”.

The prime minister is accorded wide latitude to manage the work of his ministerial team, while the head of state meets senior figures in private at the presidential palace in the capital, Yaoundé.

Culled from the BBC

Our traditional rulers have been turned into auxiliaries of an alien enemy administration and informants of the brutal colonial secret police in the land which our ancestors passed over to us and posterity. These are the crimes our Ambazonia self defense groups have taken up arms to free all of us from. If they arrest enemy collaborators or request banned enemy economic operators to pay back some of our own money which they stole or facilitated the theft through their conscious collaboration or facilitation that, cannot be characterized as ransom.

Our self-defense forces need to acquire weapons to prosecute the liberation war of self-defense. They need to feed themselves. They need to acquire intelligence from the enemy camp. They need to secure our borders and our communities. They live the daily realities of the brutal acts of genocide and must take self-survival tactics to fight this war which is escalating every day.

Extract from a Cameroon Concord News editorial by Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

2018 is an election year and it appears all tricks are acceptable, especially when there are no real economic and financial results that can endear a government to its people. True to its philosophy, the CPDM government yesterday March 22 staged a new show, using Vision 4, a local TV channel, to announce that the former minister of water and energy, Basil Atangana Kouna (BAK), who had fled the country last week when news of his impending arrest was released to the public following allegations of fraud and embezzlement when he was the head of Cameroon’s water corporation (CAMWATER) had been brought back to the country.

BAK, as he is popularly called, was until early March the powerful minister of water and energy who had transformed himself into a weapon of mass destruction for young jobless Cameroonians, many of whom have been condemned to wearing diapers for the rest of their lives. BAK has left behind a trail of destruction and corruption wherever he has been to. At CAMWATER, the mess he left behind is still flowing and it has made its way to many neighborhoods. Even in Yaounde, the nation’s capital, there are many neighborhoods without water and electricity and this has gone on for years. BAK had decided to line his pocket instead of using the money for the purpose for which it was intended.

Being aware of the fate that was awaiting him following his dismissal from government, BAK gingerly hatched a plan that would spare him a long jail term. BAK had left Cameroon surreptitiously on board a Turkish airlines flight to Montreal a day before he was expected to appear in court to answer for all his financial and economic crimes. His ordinary and diplomatic passports had been seized a weak before he disappeared. His disappearance was plotted with the connivance of top government officials and senior security and intelligence officers.

BAK’s trip to Montreal had been brought to the attention of Cameroon Concord News Group on the same day he was leaving the country. A former Cameroon government undercover security agent who fled the country, had reliably informed our senior correspondent in the Ivorian capital, Abidjan, where he is living that Atangana Kouna would not be attending the court session scheduled for last Friday. The agent, who is struggling with life in Abidjan, is very bitter with the way things are turning out in Cameroon. He disagrees with BAK regarding the manner in which he has managed the energy ministry and CAMWATER, but points out that there are lots of bad elements in the system.

He argued that corruption had spread across the country like ragweed and if care was not taken, Cameroon could implode. He said many young soldiers had lost their lives in the north of the country and in the Anglophone regions, but the government was keeping things under wraps. He added that some had been killed by senior military officials due to little disagreements. The south region native stressed that the Minister of Defense, Joseph Beti Assoumou, was destroying the military, adding that his new policy of dismissing soldiers and imprisoning others for asking for their money could one day come back to bite the government. He promised to speak to our correspondent on the divisions within the ministry of defense, stressing that he had a lot to spill.

BAK’s choice of Montreal is not in error. BAK owns a mansion in an upscale neighborhood in Canada’s second largest city, Montreal. For security reasons, Cameroon Concord News Group has decided to withhold his home address. His property is estimated at more than one million dollars. Cameroonians in Canada had been planning a huge demonstration to take place in front of his mansion to let neighbors know that they were sharing their beautiful neighborhood with an embezzler and a homosexual whose actions have resulted in many deaths in his native Cameroon.

It should be recalled that BAK is not the first Cameroon government official to escape to Canada following threats of arrest by a government that has the nasty habit of jailing its real and perceived enemies for a long time without trial. Florent Ely Etoga, CRTV’s first general manager who passed away two months ago, had also embezzled CRTV’s budget and fled to Côte d’Azur in France where he lived for many years before returning to Yaounde to spend his last days. Years after, Messi Messi joined the club of embezzlers. He had once headed a prosperous Bank in Cameroon until it was alleged that he had engaged in financial malfeasance. He promptly skipped town and emerged in Montreal.

His saga started on April 19, 1992, when Garga Haman Adji, the then Minister of Public Service and State Control, announced that the Disciplinary Council of the Office of Budgetary Control (IGERA) had charged Robert Messi Messi, the former Director of the Société Camerounaise de Banque (SCB), with embezzlement. Messi Messi had already been fired as General Manager of SCB in August 1988, barely a month before the bank collapsed under the weight of its mountain of bad loans estimated at more than CFAF 150 billion. Over one thousand employees also lost their jobs in the process and many have since died due to stress and frustration.

IGERA had accused Messi Messi of swindling over CFAF 2 billion (CFAF 2,285,178,792 FCFA) and asked him to explain the whereabouts of another CFAF 45 billion missing from SCB coffers. IGERA barred him from holding public office in Cameroon for a 10-year period, and instructed the Minister of Justice to begin judicial proceedings against him. Messi Messi was also handed a CFAF 2 million fine.Instead of accepting his punishment, he simply skipped town, choosing Montreal as his destination of choice. He later sought asylum in Canada on political grounds where he is living today like a lord.

While in exile, he was interviewed in Switzerland by Celestin Monga, today a vice president at the African Development Bank in Abidjan, where Mr. Messi Messi alleged that most of the money had been taken by the country’s first lady and his family who kept on showing up in his office with notes from the Unity Palace that they be given money. The Unity Palace has never confirmed or disconfirmed that information, but what is clear is that the taxpayer had been robbed of a huge amount of money.

Atangana Kouna’s story is a déjà vu. Same people, same comedy. The story about his return to Cameroon on Thursday, March 22, 2018, is more of a distraction and part of a game that is designed to enrich certain people. The government of Cameroon is famous for playing games with the minds of its people. Alcohol consumption, which is a favorite pastime in Cameroon, seems to have reduced the people’s ability to think and analyze issues independently.

The government is aware of this and it is making hay while the sun shines. Elections are in the offing and there is no better way to distract a people who have been rendered helpless due to tough economic times. The government has weaponized poverty and it is using it to keep Cameroonians under control. Poverty can disarm even the bravest and it has indeed robbed Cameroonians of their mental capabilities and dignity. To the developed mind, yesterday’s story has produced more questions than answers. It is hard buying into the story that Atangana Kouna has been brought back to Cameroon “manu militari” from Nigeria.

The pictures of a plane purported to be carrying Basil Atangana Kouna do not tell any story. There were no pictures of BAK. If the photographer could take pictures of the airplane, why could he not take pictures of BAK as he alighted from the Chinese made airplane in handcuffs? Which other way could have been used to convince skeptics about the government’s determination to bring back criminals to Cameroon for them to answer for their crimes?

In all of the noise, nobody, not even those who broke the news, have made mention of the airport whence the flight originated. The story has only been that he has been brought back from Nigeria. From which airport did the flight originate? Cameroon Concord News Group wants to get to the bottom of the matter. It is prepared to send its reporters to gather more information in Nigeria. However, it needs the originating airport in order for it to do a clean job.

After all the buzz about BAK returning to Cameroon and being taken to the famous SED, Cameroon Concord News Group on Friday dispatched its West Africa Bureau Chief, Kingsley Betek,  to SED to talk to some of his contacts who have always elected anonymity. According to one of them “BAK is a huge, handsome, and fair in complexion guy with a physical presence. If he is around, it will be easy to see him even from a distance. I have not seen anything extraordinary around here, but I will have my ears to the ground and will advise you whenever anything pops up.”

BAK’s story is being used by the regime to prove that it is effective. It is seeking to mend the dents its image has taken following BAK’s disappearance from Cameroon under embarrassing circumstances. The country’s intelligence community is still recovering from this embarrassment. However, it is used to such embarrassment. Many government officials have left the country incognito even when the country’s intelligence services are monitoring them. Corruption has finally spread to the intelligence services. Nobody is safe. Even Etoudi knows that with a few millions of francs, the country’s intelligence services could betray it.

The government is at its wit’s end. Its poor economic performance is coming back to haunt it. Corruption has become a norm in the country. As elections approach, the government needs something to distract Cameroonians. The Southern Cameroons crisis has diminished the government’s credibility and it is scrambling for other means that may make it look credible in the eyes of the poor and desperate population. Playing games is its forte. It has been playing games with so many minds. When will it face reality and quit playing games with our minds?

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai and Kingsley Betek with correspondent reports

After more than 17 months of turmoil in Cameroon’s two restive English-speaking regions, the country’s government is still in denial that it has lost control of these regions. Despite growing insecurity in the two regions, the government still maintains that there is security in the regions. The death toll has been staggering and many families are yet to come to terms with the loss of their family members and sometimes, even their homes, especially in areas such as Kwakwa and Kembong where the government resorted to collective punishment as a means of intimidating the population.

Despite the government’s denial, it has recently created a fifth military region in Bamenda, the North West region’s capital. It has also increased the number of soldiers in Manyu Division, Southern Cameroons most populated division, where many army soldiers have been sent to an early grave. Despite the lull in fighting, there are still many skirmishes in the region and tensions remain very high. Places like Kembong in Manyu Division and Mbonge in Ndian Division are still considered by many as ticking time bombs that could go off at any time.

Analysts across the country and the world see the government’s deployment of troops in the regions as a move to face off with the separatists who are hell-bent on breaking up the country to grant the English-speaking population the independence it has been hankering after for years. The Yaounde government has also been working hard and long to prove that there is enough security in the two regions and this is fast drying up the state’s coffers and more than 800 civilian and military lives have been lost in a conflict that started with a peaceful demonstration by lawyers.

Most of the lives lost were due to the government’s refusal to head to the negotiating table, though the country’s president has, on many occasions, called for dialogue and peace as necessary factors that must be in place for the country to reach its 2035 development goals. But many analysts see the president’s calls for peace as a joke. He has been accused of paying lip service to the whole notion of peace and dialogue and his actions during the period of the conflict have clearly portrayed him as a man who professes peace, but practices violence.

The government’s violent response to demonstrations by teachers and lawyers are to blame for the degeneration of the conflict. If the entire Southern Cameroons population is in support of the calls for secession, it is more because of the government’s military response to a simple call for federalism. Many Southern Cameroonians have viewed all government actions ever since the conflict erupted as a strategy to shut up the people and keep them in the darkness of ignorance.

The Southern Cameroonian population was angered the most by the brutality Buea University students were subjected to during their call for dialogue with university authorities following a unilateral decision by Buea University authorities to increase fees.

In a typical fascist approach, the students were brutalized, some were made to drink raw sewage and many girls were raped. Similarly, many young men and women were taken to the police station and ever since, nothing has been heard about them.

The government has never apologized for allowing its forces to unleash such terror on innocent and armless students. It is yet to account for all the students who had been arrested during the student strike and the vice chancellor who was responsible for the strike, Professor Nalova Lyonga Pauline Egbe, has recently been rewarded with a ministerial position.

Ever since the conflict started, many schools have remained closed, especially in rural areas where most of the fighting is taking place today. In many of those villages, many young men have escaped into the jungle for safety as government troops have the nasty habit of brutalizing the population each time a soldier is killed by unknown armed men.

Like schools, the regions’ courts have remained closed and each time an English-speaking Cameroonian is arrested, he or she is immediately sent to Yaounde where he or she is held in custody for many months. It should be called that one of the grievances that caused the Southern Cameroons crisis was the abusive use of French in the English-speaking parts of the country and the subjecting of Southern Cameroonians to the use of French even when millions of them have not had any close contact with the language.

For more than 15 months, the country’s English-speaking minority has been striving to have the government rethink its strategy. It has organized ghost town operations with the objective of bringing the government to the negotiating table where the form of the state could be discussed in order to put an end to the hyper-centralized system that has brought frustration, death and destruction to Cameroonians. But the government’s refusal to discuss the form of the state has caused the conflict to drag on and this has resulted in moderate English-speaking Cameroonians to move from federalism to secession.

This is also causing the conflict to take a turn for the worse. Extrajudicial killings have become a daily affair and ordinary citizens are also killing and maiming soldiers in retaliation for the killing of many civilians. The arrest of secessionist’s leaders in Nigeria on January 5, 2018, and their illegal extradition to Yaounde in late January have not helped matters. These leaders have been held incommunicado for almost two months and this is a concern to rights groups which hold that they deserve a fair trial and access to lawyers.

Similarly, armed groups have also cropped up across the entire region and their actions have left the government in a tight spot. The armed groups have succeeded to kidnap a few government officials and they are threatening to kidnap more as a strategy that will push the government into telling the world where their arrested leaders are. This may also help to reduce the abuses that are fueling the conflict.

These abuses are ongoing and getting serious by the day. The international community is concerned about the Cameroon government’s refusal to call for genuine and inclusive dialogue. And its approach to the resolution of this conflict has been criticized by the International Crisis Group. In its report that was released after the English-speaking regions declared their independence last October, the rights group decried government action.

Defense and security forces have always responded with disproportionate force and this usually result in deaths and sever injuries. It attributes the injuries and deaths to the use of live ammunition and excessive use of tear gas, including in homes and against worshippers.

Defense and security forces have also arrested hundreds of people without warrants of arrest, including in their homes. They have been making use of torture, as well as inhuman and degrading treatment. Sexual abuse, destruction of property and looting of homes by soldiers and police, as well as shooting from helicopters at protesters like on October 1, 2017, in places like Kumba, Bamenda and Buea have been reported by residents, local politicians, senior officials, the press, human rights organizations and the Catholic bishops of the two regions.

Today, the Anglophone regions remain under curfew imposed by their respective governors. The curfews have been imposed supposedly to allow security forces to contain attacks by armed separatists on members of the security forces. But the security forces have also been killing civilians indiscriminately. They have also been accused of committing crimes in the regions in which they have been deployed.

Since January 2018, more than 30 members of the security forces – the military, police and gendarmes – have so far been killed in guerilla-style attacks, especially at checkpoints, with the latest taking place in Kumba on March 8. The separatists have also reported having kidnapped two government officials and efforts to locate the two officers have been futile.

As the government keeps looking the other way while its security forces continue to kill and maim ordinary citizens, the Southern Cameroonian Diaspora is also working hard to ensure that the people get the right means to protect themselves. The Diaspora has been quietly mobilizing resources to bring arms to the country. These arms are helping Southern Cameroonian fighters to give government troops a run for their money.

Though the situation may be very serious, there is still room for a negotiated agreement. The government has to abandon its policy of attrition that has not worked for 17 months and embrace genuine and sincere dialogue. This dialogue must include key members of the Anglophone Diaspora which has a huge war chest.

The Southern Cameroonian Diaspora is rich. It is a Diaspora that has transformed marginalization into opportunity. If the government of Cameroon has to dream of political stability, it must reconcile with the Southern Cameroonian Diaspora that has a huge stomach for a fight. The Southern Cameroons Diaspora will continue to destabilize the country if the government does not reach out to members of this Diaspora.

Recycling old members of government and bringing those the population has rejected like Atanga Nji and Nalova Lyonga into government will not bring peace to Cameroon. Atanga Nji and Nalova Lyonga do not represent anybody and they will surely not have an audience to talk to. If the government is ready and willing to bring about an end to this conflict, it must be willing to engage with the Southern Cameroonian Diaspora which is highly concentrated in North America and the United Kingdom.

The world has changed. The Diaspora is a key factor in any country’s development. Ignoring this huge and resourceful group will only rob Cameroon of the peace it needs to engage in serious development activities. Being in denial is only making matters worse. The current lull could be deceiving. It could simply be the calm before the storm as Southern Cameroonian fighters are not yet ready to throw in the towel. There is no return to the status quo ante. The form of the state must be discussed and the Southern Cameroons Diaspora must be made to take its place at the table if peace has to return to Cameroon.

By Kingsley Betek and Pelagie Ebot with contributions from Rita Akana and Ebong Ngole