CAMEROON: LET US PHILOSOPHIZE ON POWER.
Rousseau in the Geneva Manuscript states that everything is radically linked to politics. Since politics is about power, everything revolves around power. How power is gotten, by whom and how it is used or misused is the preoccupation of the political philosopher. Before asking the inconvenient question about the use of power in Cameroon’s politics, it is beneficial for us to define what power means.
Power, according to Aristotelian Metaphysics, is a thing’s potential to influence other things apart from itself to act otherwise. Isolating it to politics, Power can be.
1. By Affluence, which is a measure of economic wealth. The Dialectical Materialism of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, The Wealth of the Nation of Adam Smith were all founded on the premise that “seek ye first the economic Kingdom and the rest will be yours”
2. By Right, which is the moral strength to do or to refrain from doing and act in relation to one’s conscience. This is the power of clean lives on which the constitutions of great nations are founded. The Magna Carter, The American Bill of Rights, The Mosaic Torah, The Catholic Apostolic Creed, etc. alia are all products of Right as the Moral Power of Conscience,
3. By Might, which is the exercise of brutal force on others. The brutal repression of an idea can only generate an undesired effect of more resistance. This is the reason why no army, no matter how powerful, has ever defeated its own people.
4. By Charisma, which is the use of one’s god given talents, like musical and other arts, to influence society. A musician who strips himself may be provoking a debate on the naked truth about our nakedness as a people.
5. By Romance, which is the use of one’s sexual potential to influence policies and to gain influence. It is called Bottom Power.
6. Mysterious Power is the ability to harness the Metaphysical force in the universe and to use or misuse it on others. Here lies Prayers, Religion, and witchcraft. In Cameroon, alongside the appeal to God in prayers for good governance, there is Muyongo or the Mami watta mystical consciousness. Even Scholars and intellectuals groomed in Western science and education would stoop low to a rustic marabout to seek the mystical passage to power. You see a former minister running naked in his Adam’s suit under the command of a village witch doctor to be reappointed.
7. There is the power of the Absurd. This is the power that defies classification and always takes the politician off guard, like an invisible hand behind the events. These are powers of things that surprise us from the miscellany of our consciousness. For example, Cameroon’s failure to win a crucial football match may trigger a revolution. Who could have foreseen the full impact of a man standing in a coffin on the present state of our senseless war?
DEAR. LOVER OF WISDOM and Lover of power in Cameroon, remember be warned that power has an expiry date, so it must be used judiciously. Power flatters the wielder’s ego to forget that he or she is human and not a god. It is good to leave power before power abandons you. Go ask Mandela, Nyerere, Sedar Senghor, and Ahidjo. Political Power in Africa is like riding a tiger; the day you drop from its back, the tiger eats you. Listen to the Carpenter from Nazareth
Bawe Louis Tarawo
