21, April 2019
Regime change in Africa: Next Stop—-Yaounde 0
In under a month, two African dictators have been brought down by mass protests. Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 82, and Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir, 75, resigned after massive protests. Bouteflika had ruled Algeria for 30 years and was seeking re-election amidst declining health, while Al-Bashir had been at the helm of Sudan since 1989. These events have focused attention on long-serving dictators in Africa and how this wave might affect their political futures. Amongst them is Cameroon’s Paul Biya.
At 85, he has ruled Cameroon for 36 years and was recently declared winner in a hotly contested election that saw now detained opposition leader Maurice Kamto, declaring himself winner. There are striking similarities amongst the African dictatorships that have recently been toppled such as Gambia, Zimbabwe, Algeria and Sudan. These governments are characterized by huge deficits including dictatorship, long rule, abuse of institutions, poverty, corruption, and youth unemployment. These indicators are very present in Cameroon under the Biya regime and have implanted acute feelings of dissatisfaction, frustration and inertia triggering pockets of protest, resistance and rebellion across the country. Recent events in the country contain all the telltale signs of a regime in decline and a failing environment.
For a long time Paul Biya has relied on the usual dictatorial tactics to maintain his stranglehold on the country; ethnic divisions, brutal military crackdown on dissenters, arrest and imprisonment of opposition leaders, keeping a close college of cronies, most of whom are from his region of origin and have remained blind loyalists. Those that have shown signs of wavering have been quickly thrown in prison. Loyalists make dictators. Because above all else, the sustaining element of dictatorships is the willingness of a cross-section of the oppressed to not just acquiesce but to actively seek the oppression of all others. Biya has shrewdly eschewed a military coup, especially after the April 1984 attempt failed, by neutralizing the power of the military through the creation of several independent military and paramilitary bodies with him as the only centralized commander. In addition, the military, across its ranks is made up of members of his ethnic group.
The uncertainty of where power resides makes it difficult to stage a coordinated takeover. Following the October 7, 2018 presidential election, supporters of the leading opposition party, Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) staged peaceful demonstrations protesting election results and the government’s handling of the ongoing socio-political crisis plaguing the country’s two English speaking regions. The leader of the CRM and presidential candidate, Maurice Kamto was arrested and has been in detention alongside 131 supporters. In the meantime, he has been charged with rebellion, inciting insurrection, offence against the president of the republic and treason amongst others. Charges which if found guilty, he and his supporters will be facing the death penalty. All forms of anti-regime demonstrations are immediately banned in the country ensuring and fostering a system in which there is no space for democratic expression.
The government and its supporters have attempted to downplay demonstrations by CRM as a parochial group of people from the Western region of the country, lacking nationwide support, but who want to muzzle their way into power. The fallout has been the increase in hate speech and tribalism, especially on social media with supporters of Biya and Kamto referring to each other as ‘sardinards’ and ‘tontinard’, respectively. These two derogatory appellations which have gained widespread use are interpreted to mean Biya supporters are a selfish bunch who vote based on receiving cans of sardines, while tontinards means Kamto’s supporters as miserly and cheap. This trend of ‘us’ against ‘them’ has bled through the country manifesting in the description of Anglophones as “Biafrans” and “Ambazonians”, and Northerners as “Sheep”.
This is a country disintegrating on the crucible of hate speech and ethnicity. Perhaps one of the early signs of a crack in the government of Biya is the new trend of leaks of sensitive and classified documents. Because the government has a long history of withholding information from the public, the recent upsurge in leaks is indicative of fault lines within the government ranks. Just over a week ago, classified documents were leaked detailing the president’s planned sojourn to Switzerland and the accompanying security details. Hitherto, this would have been majorly unheard of, and its occurrence now signals a lot. No other happening right now spells more trouble for the Biya reign than the ongoing crisis in the English speaking regions of the country. The crisis is caused by Anglophone perceptions of over 57 years of marginalization by the two successive francophone-led governments. The Anglophone regions voted to join the French speaking side in 1961 in a federation.
Anglophones have over the years complaint about the abrogation of the terms of the union including the dismantling of the federal system and the destruction and neglect of pristine Anglophone culture and institutions such as the English common law system and the Anglophone educational system and the underrepresentation of Anglophones in government. These grievances have bulged into calls for outright secession to create the putative state of Ambazonia. The government’s reaction to the Anglophone protest was characterized by military clampdown and what has been described as imposition of measures and solutions on the protesters. Essentially, the government has failed to productively handle the grievances leading to armed resistance.
The crisis has dealt a severe blow on the country’s economy with thousands being internally displaced, with over half a million refugees in Nigeria, hundreds have been killed and education has been halted in many areas in the Anglophones regions by separatist militia. This crisis poses a serious existential threat to the country as a whole but more so to the longevity of the Biya reign. And this is largely due to its economic impact. Though Cameroon is not officially classified as a fragile state by the World Bank, it contains all the indicators including weak institutional coping capacity to withstand external shocks, pressures and risks; it is facing violent conflicts, high unemployment, corruption and embezzlement, poor health and educational infrastructure etc.
Quite frankly, the economic threat posed by the Anglophone crisis is what might just tip the country over to open mayhem. It can be argued that the reason why there is still an uneasy stability in the country is because it has not been completely tethered economically. Cameroonians can still afford basic needs and daily food but the prices of basic commodities are on a steady rise especially with the stall of free-flow of economic activities and products from many parts of the English speaking regions. In 2008, the country witnessed a nationwide strike due to hikes in fuel prices. This is indicative, and the government should understand this by now, that it would be brought to its knees by economic pressures as prices of commodities continue to soar.
The state-owned agro-industrial corporation, the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), is operating at below 10% of its capacity, losing billions as a result of attacks by separatists on their operations. CDC is one of the major employers in the country and the loss in production capacity has led to non-payment of salaries and arrears and general disgruntlement. It is only a matter of time before separatist block the flow of oil from the southwest region of the country as they have attempted and sometimes succeeded with other produce like timber. Blocking the flow of oil will paralyze the entire CEMAC zone which is dependent on the country’s oil refinery, SONARA. It is clear that the key strategy of separatists is to attack state institutions, stall their functioning, strain the government economically and then bring it to its knees.
Clearly, the government still survives because the crisis in the Anglophone regions and the protests in other regions like those spearheaded by opposition leaders have not been able to coalesce into a nationwide protest. However, with the current trend of economic decline, it is only a matter of time before economic disgruntlement matures into popular uprising. The trigger at that time, like in Sudan, might be something which a notoriously complacent regime would consider insignificant, such as bread.
Culled from Face2face Africa
23, April 2019
A raft of crises now face Cameroon 0
Soccer fans in Cameroon were undoubtedly dismayed in January when the Confederation of African Football stripped the country of its hosting the 2019 June-July African Cup finals. The body cited security issues and lack of preparation in transferring the honor to six-time African Cup host Egypt.
But the recent ouster of two long-serving African presidents—Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan—has intensified the focus by Cameroonians on the nearly 37-year reign of their aloof 86-year-old president, Paul Biya. Citing corruption and political marginalization, opposition figures and Anglophone region activists strive to make Biya the third African leader ousted in 2019 as a result of popular protests. So far, Cameroon’s security services have managed to suppress protests that have broken out, but the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe has been effective in generating sustained attention for change.
While only intermittently covered by American media, and with the United Nations and African Union mostly mute, Cameroon is currently engulfed in three separate crises.
First, since 2014, Boko Haram has terrorized Cameroon’s far north region, adjacent to Nigeria’s Borno State (where Boko Haram was founded in the city of Maiduguri) with murders, kidnappings, and destruction of infrastructure. Despite military support, training, and equipment from the United States and others, Boko Haram in Cameroon remains a persistent, serious threat. Tens of thousands are displaced and livelihoods destroyed. With Boko Haram incursions on the rise in 2019, Yaoundé’s brutal security responses are so tainted with credible human rights allegations that the United States in February announced a reduction in its assistance.
Second, peaceful protests against linguistic and political marginalization in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions erupted in 2016. Anglophones account for approximately 20 percent of Cameroon’s population, with the rest considered Francophone (in addition to about 200 local languages). These protests quickly escalated in 2017 into a violent secessionist insurgency and counter-insurgency. Anglophone separatists hoping to create an independent state of “Ambazonia” in the northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon have attacked soldiers and government installations and killed civilians perceived to be government sympathizers. Local and international human rights activists have documented scorched-earth military reprisals and extrajudicial killings. With positions hardening on both sides, the government rebuffed mediation and dialogue facilitation offers by the United Nations and others, demanding that the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative for Central Africa Francois Fall, a former foreign minister of Guinea, end his quiet diplomacy in the Anglophone region. During his March 2019 trip to Cameroon in which he encouraged peaceful resolution of the Anglophone crisis, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy was sharply criticized by pro-government sources for “interference.”
In addition to the heavy burdens imposed by the Boko Haram and Anglophone crises, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that Cameroon—with a population of 24 million—hosts nearly 400,000 refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Nigeria and the Central African Republic.
Now, with the Algerian and Sudanese protests leading to the respective militaries’ removal of two long-serving presidents, previously disparate and quiescent opposition against President Paul Biya has mobilized to create Cameroon’s third, and—while not yet violent—potentially most serious crisis. With previous constitutional term limits abolished in 2008, Biya, who has ruled since November 1982 (and who served as prime minister from 1975 until 1982), was sworn in November 2018 for his seventh presidential term. The official election results, disputed by the opposition, gave him 71 percent of the vote, with opposition leader Maurice Kamto in second position, with just over 14 percent.
For years, fatigue and disenchantment with Biya’s rule has simmered below the surface in Cameroon and boiled openly in the Cameroonian diaspora. Complaints and jokes focus on his frequent and lengthy sojourns in Europe, corruption, aloofness, curtailment of civil liberties, lifestyle of his younger wife Chantal, and (given Biya’s age of 86) lack of any transparent succession planning. The lopsided official election results provoked protests in Cameroon and in diaspora communities, with Kamto claiming victory. The January 2019 arrest of Kamto and scores of protestors in the port city of Douala attracted scant notice in the media outside of Cameroon (despite condemnations from Nagy, EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, and others) but reinforced the opposition protests, especially in Europe. Expats attacked Cameroon’s embassies in Paris and Berlin and threatened to storm Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel, should Biya, a frequent resident, again check in.
Now, with the removals of Bouteflika and Bashir, anti-Biya protesters hope to attract attention with new chants: “It can happen in Sudan; it can happen in Cameroon.” So far, Cameroon’s security services have managed to prevent sustained, mass demonstrations at home. As was the case in Algeria and Sudan while the protest movements swelled, it is not clear how the military would react should the Cameroon opposition movement gain momentum. The military’s performance in the Anglophone and Boko Haram violence is not encouraging, in terms of adherence to human rights norms. But fighting Boko Haram terrorists and Anglophone secessionists simultaneously may give Cameroon’s military leaders pause before taking on, in addition, political protestors in Cameroon’s Francophone political heartland, should Sudan-style mass protests materialize. Biya himself is taking no chances: Unusually for him, he has remained in Cameroon for more than 200 days without travel to Europe.
What is clear is that this is the time for conflict prevention efforts by African or other leaders, in hopes of moderating any response to protests in order to stave off the potential for a third Cameroon crisis turning violent. The problem is identifying a person, institution, or country with influence on Biya, who has been as aloof from his peers as from Cameroon’s citizenry. Despite his frequent and extended absences from Cameroon, he has not used the time abroad to bond with other leaders, rarely attending the annual United Nations General Assembly and only participating in a single African Summit in the last seven years. (Biya attended the March 2013 African Summit in Malabo, probably due to his shared Fang ethnic connection to Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.) Compared to other heads of state in Francophone Africa, Biya is not especially close to Paris. Given Biya’s de facto part-time residency in Switzerland, and in light of the Cameroonian diaspora’s focus on Geneva, the Swiss may have both interests and leverage, especially if backed by others such as Nagy’s, Mogherini’s, and African Union interventions.
Yet as failed conflict prevention efforts globally demonstrate, persuading any national leader to accept outside help to address a domestic political issue is hard. Biya’s response to U.N., U.S., and other efforts to focus on peaceful resolution of the Anglophone conflict is not encouraging. Regional and international unity to demand a political approach to address Anglophone grievances and expand political space (including release of opposition activists, including Kamto) might force Biya to adjust his approach but will require leadership by the United States or another power to muster. Credit agencies have already noticed that all is not well in Yaounde, with Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s both recently indicating a “negative outlook” to their respective B and B2 credit ratings.
Cameroon’s immediate neighbors are themselves facing challenges and are not in positions to offer much in the way of help or example. To Cameroon’s northwest, parts of Nigeria remain terrorized by Boko Haram. To Cameroon’s east, the Central African Republic remains deeply unstable and violent, despite the February agreement signed in Khartoum by 14 militias. South of Cameroon, Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba claimed victory in a disputed 2016 election (extending his family’s nearly half-century control over Gabon) but has since October 2018 been absent from Libreville for long stretches of time for health issues. On Cameroon’s southeastern border, the Republic of Congo under President Denis Sasso-Nguesso (no stranger to controversial lopsided election results) has used violence against demonstrators in the Pool region, leading to tens of thousands of displaced, in addition to hosting thousands of refugees fleeing violence in the neighborhood Democratic Republic of Congo. This part of Africa has no shortage of crises, but little in the way of obvious solutions.
Culled from The Brookings Institution