By Yerima Kini Nsom
From every indication, many of those who call the establishmental shots are determined to ensure that what reigns supreme is the Darwinian law in which the emergently rich and the obscenely mighty will confiscate Cameroon from the rest of Cameroonians, including President Paul Biya. The logic here seems to be a Machiavellian bid in which the emasculated masses, who barely exist in want, penury and deprivation, are further victimised.
This is what a political analyst, Saint Eloi Bidoung, referred to recently as a scientific coup. In such a situation, some officials sing hypocritical encomiums in honour of President Paul Biya, but run counter to all the policies that he has prescribed for the socio-economic, cultural and political development of the nation. The maxim and guiding principle for the various state officials and all other citizens is rigour and moralisation. Thus, the best way to demonstrate love for President Paul Biya, is to hearken to the scruples of rigour and moralisation. We can also add corpus to this love by applying his Communal Liberalism policies. When officials do the contrary, it can only be equated to the demonstration of hatred for our President and not love.
It can only be hypocrisy or madness for any official to abuse human rights, violate the law, victimise ordinary citizens and deprive them of basic social amenities in the name of showing love for President Paul Biya. It is likely that even those who line their pockets unduly with state funds and leave the public treasury bleeding profusely, will also claim to be doing so on behalf of the President. Again, we cannot gag the press and stop it from reporting on certain grave issues of national import in the name of the President. By the way, it is an aberration to be attempting to transform citizens to think-same and act-same robots in a country as diverse as Cameroon. Who does not remember that the panel of a certain radio programme was shoved into goal for talking about the advent of multiparty politics in Cameroon? What finally happened? President Biya ended up vindicating the journalists by beckoning multiparty politics aboard the Cameroonian nation. Only for narrow reasons will some officials pretend to be more catholic than the pope as it were,
Many of our officials who ought to be showing the good example, have hurled rigour and moralisation to the dogs. By their aversion to public decency, they are gradually transforming Cameroon to a republic of the obscenely mighty wherein might is right. Chasing filthy lucre without the fear of God, is right here. There is the triumph of a fallacy to the effect that the fear of God and the decorum pursuit are only for the poor and the desperate. That is why any insistence on the respect for norms, easily rankles the Kadiyes and attracts boorish reactions. Their relationship with the people is predicated on soapbox scamming, blackmail and intimidation. The people are often fooled into a football field only to discover that the game being played is rugby.
Faced with a rampaging repressive machine, the people simply clip their tails like frightened dogs and complained about their agonising plight only in soliloquies. In a bid to put a smile on the faces of some of those who torment them for the sake of safety, they join the motion-of-support caravan even when all the odds are stacked against them. The alleluia choir must be on stage with encomiast renditions even when the public service, state corporations, universities and other state institutions are being transformed into epicenters of ethnic bigotry and tribal petit-mindedness. And what is often served the powerless and the have-nots in the wake of any altercation, is vengeance, not justice. For, justice is not for the poor. It is business all the same … it doesn’t really matter if any decision is a blunder for the record books or not. Who cares?
Their magic wand and a ready-made solution, repression, to every dissenting voice that does not put a smile on their faces, have been perfect. Repression, it must be stated unequivocally, is one of the leading nation-killing vices. It strips away from the minds of the people the knowledge that they have rights. This reduces the people’s ability to contribute in the construction of the national edifice. Yet, unscrupulous officials remain boundless in their show of coercion and might. They don’t care a damn whether the father of this nation wants prosperity to remember him as someone who brought democracy and prosperity to Cameroon or not. They know so well that the right to freedom of expression is a prerequisite to the rigour, vigour and the vitality of all other rights.
Even when it is well established that democracy is the antithesis of absolute rule, they use the sophistic surge and sway of their linguistic acrobatics in a futile attempt to convince people that the two models are two sides of the same coin. And who does not know that the embers of hate are still being fanned by those whose mission is to foster love, fraternity, living, eating and starving together. That is why certain celebrations that these people organise, remain a mockery of the masses. Such celebrations, which often border on peace and living together, are usually marked by hypocritical speechifying, deceptive cant and chicanery. They usually ride roughshod over the conventional practice that national anniversaries are meant for stakeholders to pause and ponder over the issues at stake.
Thus, any anniversary celebration that does not fashion in sincere counsels and reason-inspired decisions, should be jettisoned as bootless. But, since reaping from the public till unduly has become common currency and “country fashion” for some officials, certain events must be organised so that they can swell their Swiss bank accounts. We do not need to go far to look for enemies of the Republic and those who are so determined to rob President Paul Biya of his democratic legacy.