By Bate Besong
The foundation of which the Cameroonian Federation was built in Foumban, in 1961, was a power arrangement contoured to deal with a sociologically complex polity as presented by our multi-ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversities. It was a type of national integration that recognized the two separate but equal parts and the central government, in Ahmadou Ahidjo’s Yaounde, as mutually coordinate, and not subordinate one to the other.
The present mode of tribal, pro-consular governance, which is primarily an economic system of penetration and command, is a manifestation of injustice and insensitivity to people of this region.
In view of the above, the people of the South West Province believe that the denial of their property rights through ethno-fascist legislation and formal constitutional exclusions would not have been attempted if the bulk of such natural resources as timber, petroleum, kaolin, oil and gas were located in the Centre and South francophone regions, for instance.
Ranajit Guha (1982) states that the failure of the post colonial nation-state can only be understood by looking at class, region, gender and other social formations and tensions in a once balkanised, traumatized and re-colonized country, for example, like Grandes Ambitiones Cameroon.
In consonance with the ideal of true Re-Unification that Cameroonians in their millions strongly desire, the centralist Gaullist authoritarianism which characterises the New Deal mode of governance which seeks to produce a degenerate, vacuous and uncreative homogenization is anathema.
The people of this region believe in the unity of the Cameroonian Federation and have made great sacrifices at every turn to protect it.
The ideology of tribal hegemony translated easily implies that members of this annexed territory, off springs of the Southern Cameroons, must forever remain cheap labour and caboceers, apparitions of South West Elite Association (SWELA), degenerate visioners of South West Chief’s Conference (SWECC) and – alas – stooges-in-training; fox-trotting gargoyles of University of Buea ANCHOR!
RAUCOUS GREED IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
CPDM- propped associations such as SWECC and SWELA prefer the static nature of the historical moment in which society would become vitiated and in the process make no attempt to transcend its sense of vulnerability.
The world of SWECC or SWELA is that of negation, defeat, and fragmentation. The core of South West concern is the emergence of a genuine unity which transcends the existing shallow unity of lip service sustained only by such imbecilities as “We remain one and Undivided”, “Cameroon as a state of law and legality”.
The South West chief or elite, however, has no human sympathy. As a main plank of the “New” Deal strategy of divide-and-rule, this blank and insensitive phenomenon has refused to realize that there is a tomorrow. He sees the entrenched economic interest of the puppet-master in the region as firm and unchangeable.
His highly subjective view of the Re-Unification agenda is deliberately limited. At a deeper level, however, his role is to smoother the contradictions and conflicts of entrenched economic interests in the breadbasket of a skewered and aborted federation.
Thus, in all his facile and short-sighted illusory feeling of power and permanence; for him, nothing, has changed, or will ever change.
Kwame Nkrumah has given a prophetic insight into the greed and clownery of this class when, in Class Struggle in Africa (1982) he averred that “ Africa has in its midst a hard core of bourgeoisie who are analogous to colonists and settlers in that they live in positions of privilege – a small, selfish, money-minded, reactionary minority among vast masses of exploited and oppressed peoples” (12).
The struggle against the South West Chiefs’ Conference (SWECC) and South West Elite Association (SWELA) has become a historical necessity inherent in the contradictions within the dysfunctional equation where the producer-majority classes are exploited and oppressed for the ruling, ethno- fascist cabal.
WRITING SCNC AS HOMELAND
For decades now, the people of the South West region, off springs of Southern Cameroons have had considerable difficulty in inserting their regional interests in the “New “ Deal agenda such as their right to equitable participation in the political, economic and cultural life of the nation.
The centralist authoritarianism, which characterizes the l’état c’est moi form of their experience, has led to an ethno-fascist mode of governance which seeks to produce an uncreative, and Focartian homogenization.
In view of the above, the South West region is faced with a situation akin to internal colonization rather than national integration.
The refusal to expand the democratic space to include alter-native voices and marginalized groups, is a major obstacle to socio-economic and political development and the realization of the intellectual and physical potentials of the individuals and the South West, Anglophone, annexed territory.
In effect, what this means in political terms, is that through a long catalogue of obnoxious appointments, negative discrimination, and offensive laws, the people of this region have been shamelessly and undemocratically excluded from the enjoyment of their property rights.
Though national integration is not asphyxiation of minorities, but a recognition of cultural diversities and autonomy of different component parts, power and wealth, continue to be unduly concentrated at an unwieldy and unpredictable centre.
Beneath the smokescreen of les Grandes Ambitiones, discriminatory attitudes by the Gaullist, Cameroonian state since Foumban, remain, entrenched. The history of the South West colony encapsulates the history of the Southern Cameroonian struggle to rid itself of internal colonialism and post-colonial subjugation.
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