October 12 Election: The Dance of the Bishop’s Devils
Victor Epie’Ngome
The argument is not just plausible but soundly tenable that Cameroon has hit rock bottom in governance, and can only go up now. I may be paraphrasing the Catholic prelate who urged Cameroonians in this week’s election to trust their fortunes in any other hands, even the devil’s. There couldn’t possibly be a more damning indictment of an epicurean skipper carousing and binging away time and resources, while the ship of state is floundering in shallow waters and headed for the rocks.
The bishop was derided and berated, his words taken for apostasy. And now it’s beginning to look like most Cameroonians actually took him literally. The way the run-up to the election is playing out, it seems they are so desperate for a change that they really do not care who they’re changing for and where he’ll take them to.
Come on, Cameroonians, you are and deserve far better than that. Yes, desperate times call for desperate measures, but you are not at that level of despondency where you must blindly settle for just anything.
If you still believe in a country you call your own, then you have to dig deep inside yourselves for the resources to take ownership of it and make yourselves worthy of it, and it of you. Digging deep means you must get back to where the rain began beating you as a people, and every step you take henceforth must be to ensure it never happens again.
This election is that turning point – the moment to take stock without complacency; the moment to embark inexorably on correcting those past mistakes that made of this country the laughingstock of this continent.
No Foreign Marionettes
Looking in our driving mirror, our downslide to the doldrums began the day the French came into our lives as a people. Even the Germans, who had colonized us, having met not a nation but a handful of tribal Kingdoms, never exploited us with so much greed and recklessness as the French, who only came here because the UN mandated them, with the Brits to prepare us for self-rule.
This is not a history lesson, but we need to understand that we are where we are today because the French, having discovered our potential, decided that self-rule was exactly what they should only let us acquire over their dear bodies. It’s the case of a midwife stealing the baby. Incidentally, we’re not the only ones they did that to. There are at least thirteen others. But the scales have fallen from the eyes of some of them, and, like strong mothers, they have stood up and wrested back their babies from the midwife.
As the campaigns for this election rage, I see scrambling for bread, sardines and beer – mocking incentives to vote for the status quo. In other words, some of you would rather keep the baby in the custody of the thieving midwife than give it back to its mother.
Put bluntly, if we only realize how much the French have been ripping us off with the help of our very own, this election must be the moment to say “never again”.
It means there will be no vote for any candidate who fails to convince you that he will put the French where they deserve to be – as an equal business partner and NEVER AGAIN as a puppeteer with local marionettes. This means we must be on the lookout for any foreign Trojan horses in this election, as well as surrogates of our exploiters in next year’s legislatives.
Does the Anglophone vote count?
Many of you must have heard Albert Zongang’s recent confessions and disclosures by Henrietta Ekwe, both about the 1992 election. Both declared what many have believed all along – that the real winner was deprived of his win, because he was an anglophone. That’s how far down we’ve gone in the language and culture war being fought across the Mungo – a proxy war between the languages and cultures of the French and the Brits, whereas between Calais and Dover, trade is roaring and traffic is fluid.
And that takes all the substance out of slogans and hashtags like “one and indivisible” that we’re now hearing at campaign rallies. I wonder if the goal post has been shifted back since 1992 to finally make Étoudi accessible to both Francophone and Anglophone aspirants. If not, then does a segment of the population excluded from that office have any business with this or subsequent elections?
This is another of the questions to which this electorate has to provide a decisive answer – which answer one expects ELECAM and the Supreme Court to validate with newfound integrity and guts.
North-South or East-West?
Finally, one hears a lot of banter about power returning to the North, having been given to the South. Nothing could be more preposterous, because in 1982 Ahidjo bequeathed the seat to Biya, based not on his southern origin but on his perceived loyalty and his pliancy to letting his benefactor become his backseat driver.
So, where did the idea of power alternation between North and South come from? Whence did a North-South bipolarity surface in a Cameroon of ten regions? The only bipolarity that made sense, but which Ahidjo was prompt to erase, was between East and West Cameroon. Those, and not the North and South, were the poles between which any power alternation pendulum could logically oscillate.
Now we have candidates from all the cardinal points. Voters must put one of them in Étoudi strictly because of what he stands for and not of where he comes from.
That takes us back to the Bishop’s devil. We have listened to all the hot air about a single opposition candidate and about forming a coalition. Now we see the horse trading is on, and in the hours to come, we’ll see some more. The good devils will line up behind, and give their whips to the one of them with the longest horns. The bad ones – the spoilers and the ‘bellyticians’ – will hang on to their tiny whips, knowing they are nothing but fly swats to the giant lion opposite.
Be it as it may, after October 12, Cameroon as a nation will be singing a new song. It will either be an ecstatic Hallelujah or a doleful dies irae; with jubilant shouts of “FREE AT LAST” or silent moans of “God, not again”. But after all is won and lost, after all is sold and bought, one must fear an Akeldema for any Judases.
October 12 Election: The Dance of the Bishop’s Devils -Victor Epie’Ngome
