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A man of God came on the other day in a video, screaming at the top of his voice and saying that the Etoudi palace was under threat. He did not state the source of the threat, nor who was behind it. He just repeated, continuously, the call for people to pray for the palace. One recent event that happened at the Etoudi Unity Palace in Yaounde is the alleged burglary of a couple of weeks ago. To date, it is not known what was stolen from the palace during that break-in. It is alleged that the intruders did not touch the bales of banknotes that were lying in that office. Other sources added that the surveillance security system was switched off before a loot of FCFA 6 billion was carried out and a list of a new government was made public on social media. Nkukuma NOMNGIE has not made an official statement since then.
Then, just the week after that, word came out that Mademoiselle Brenda, daughter of the head of state of LRC, who normally resides in the same Etoudi palace, had come out of the closet. She could be seen with her Brazilian lover in a picture that accompanied the shocking announcement. The reactions to the news of the coming out were mixed. And all that is coming from private individuals. After all, several people in the upper echelons of the regime do practice what Miss Brenda appears to have just discovered. Many condemned her. Speaking in French, one of Brenda’s critics with a hint of the accent from a particular region in Cameroun, a certain influencer, expressed her disgust in a vulgar and unladylike language. The interview which Brenda granted to a French daily newspaper in Paris did not make the situation better in the eyes of many observers. In it, she suggested that it was the place of the government to decriminalise homosexuality in the country. This might be her reason for coming out in such a public way. Then, later, news started trickling down that the breaking into Mr Motaze’ Ayolo’s office at the presidency was to steal the list of names of ministers who were to be included in the next government to be announced. It is said that, on a recent weekend, the President, Mr. Paul Biya, his son, Frank Biya and Mvondo Ayolo, the Director of Civil Cabinet at the presidency, had travelled to Mvomeka’a to put together the said new government. It is this list that became the object of the theft. Whether the list was stolen by the alleged burglars is yet to be determined. Although it is not yet known whose names were on the said list and whose were not, some people think that Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh was to be removed from the presidency and transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, far away from his present lofty office of secretary general at the presidency as well as from his bogus and unconstitutional presidential signature. It ought to be required that parliament be involved in the legislation to grant such enormous powers to an unelected civil servant, even though parliament’s work has, for long, been limited to just cursory oversight and rubber-stamping of bills handed down from the government.
In keeping with Brenda’s wishes, Biya’s government might as well just send a bill to parliament to reverse the offending law. And parliament will dutifully rubber-stamp it. If the pill is too bitter for the parliamentarians to swallow, they could just throw in some millions of CFA, as a bribe. They are usually very responsive to that.
Until then, the struggle continues.
