Two years that the English crisis lasts. Two years that positions are fixed, the debate purrs, the words pile up, the dead pile up, Cameroon crying. Two years that the squad acquired slavishly to the demiurgic image of a leader on the kneecaps repeats the same clichés, decreed the same taboos echoing the wishes of a President of the Republic that some people for God on earth. Let us pause for a moment on these postures that haunt the crisis and that some take for word of the gospel.
Verse 1: "We do not argue with terrorists"
Back in Yaounde on November 30, 2017, after taking part in the 5th African Union-European Union summit, Paul Biya delivered one of his rare statements on the Anglophone crisis. "Our country is facing a band of terrorists claiming a secessionist movement," he said, adding that "all steps are being taken to put this gang of criminals out of harm's way".
The president equates the secessionists with Boko Haram who continue to carry out horrible acts in the northern part of the country. He thus undertook to make war on them. This is all the more so since they do not go to the front to eat peanuts. But what is surprising is the fact of maintaining that no dialogue is possible with those who "take up arms against the Republic". Those who are rehashing this tale forget to say that the Anglophone crisis has been around for thirty years. That the extremism observed today is only the result of an autistic posture of the government that has never wanted to integrate the pressing need for empowerment of the management of local communities.
Some even mention cases to say how impossible it is to engage with armed groups. Without wasting time on this ridiculous exercise, let us just remember that Guillaume Soro, the former president of the National Assembly in Côte d'Ivoire (and whom we received in great pomp in our country) was, a few years ago still , a formidable warrior who had managed to partition his country before being offered a post of prime minister. But let the past go where it is and face the bloody reality of the present. How to break the deadlock? Beyond the cold and bland porridge we use Sunday specialists on our TV sets, it is obvious that the crisis is bogged down.
So how do we silence the weapons if we refuse to speak with those who hold them? How to get a ceasefire without those who are firing? "We're going to annihilate them," an organic intellectual of the regime, who has finally fallen off the mask, rages behind the scenes. We wait to see, except that in the meantime there is blood flowing. There are grieving families, there are displaced populations. There are these armed groups that have created a balance of power. It's up to us to see if dogma can bring peace.
Verse 2: "We do not negotiate the form of the state. "
Is that so ? And why ? "Because it is inscribed in the constitution, Cameroon is a decentralized unitary state", answer in heart our exegetes of the legal thought, taking again in this the words of their two ex machina. Brilliant as a demonstration. Except that the same constitution stipulated not long ago that the President of the Republic of Cameroon is elected for a term of 7 years renewable once.
It was changed in 2008 without causing further blasts at Lake Nyos. Why are we not able to revisit our holy Bible for such a vital problem when it has been blithely torpedoed to keep a man in power? Where is this famous decentralized state admirably theorized in the 1996 constitution? Is not this unitary state that is agitated as a fetish the means for our bourgeois bureaucracy and greedy to maintain its privileges?
Verse 3: "Federalism is worse than the plague"
Okay but why not talk about it? "But we are already there, decentralization is a form of federalism," quietly developed a journalist Crtv last Sunday on a popular platform of the chain that employs it. Before being kindly picked up by a political science teacher who, however, appeared to be his ally of circumstance. The Cameroonian portal of Belgium.
But who is afraid of federalism to the point of having urticaria at the mere mention of this word? The bitter failure of the decentralization of junk sold by the power should yet encourage more humility. Instead, we still have to suffer the torture of parrots programmed on computer to create panic around a concept that is not diabolical.
In a democracy, God is the people and their majority. It is not a man, even he who is President of the Republic, who stands on positions of pride and watches his people perish in their blood. It is high time to rehabilitate the discursive function of democracy to exorcise the demons of war. Only an inclusive dialogue without taboos can today draw the horizon of peace. And if the gurus who govern us finally thought to serve the people..
Source: camrb