Can President Biya Still Redeem his Tenure?

By Bate Besong
Publishedin EDEN Newspaper, Limbe, Number 59, March 2006

PROLOGUE
The system has always remained consistent with CNU traditional beliefs and Machiavellian political practices, authoritarian decision-making and refusal to delegate power and entertain dissident voices. The odium, persecution, and other forms of primordial prejudice of the last twenty-three years should not find a bazaar ground on the nation’s open sore. We have to quickly resolve all our domestic contradictions in order to concentrate our energy on coping with the challenges ahead. Whether we like it or not our choice of leadership must not be based on who is acceptable to our deviant mode of sexual conduct; in our fraternal polyandry or sorority; in our tribe; or who can preserve our privileges.

“There is no race, asserts Aime Cesaire in his famous poem, ‘Return to My Native Land,’ which held for all time the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and knowledge; and the there was a place for all at the rendez vous of human victory.

The ruling party, the CPDM, is full of maggots some of who still speaks with a Gregoire.
Owona’s bifurcated tongue about the achievements of the RENOUVEAU.
Let President Paul Biya show the spunk of leadership by seducing the aggrieved majority that he is going to be the President for ALL CAMEROONIANS.
Let him demonstrate that Cameroon’s future is OUR FUTURE.
Let his show that Patriotism will become a passion that will never fizzle out.
That we will all work TOGETHER.
THE NATION IS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE
Only the truth, sincerity and fairness will work.
Truth exists whenever the President of the Republic seeks for it.
Only FALSEHOOD has to be invented.
 
A WORST TIME WE COULD NOT IMAGINE (I)
Essentially, the Cameroonian Republic, is still being ruled, in 2006, by General Charles de Gaulle’s Congo Brazzaville manifests; “Je vous ai compris” [I have understood you.]
Twenty-three years ago, I published a poem, in the English edition of CAMEROON TRIBUNE, addressed, to the newly sworn President. The counterfeit  federal republic that Mr. Biya had, inherited, from his ‘illustrious predecessor’ was, a vicious, and perverse adversary of genuine political expression which, in subsequent years, would be dismissed by Achille Mbembe as, “the pro-French, incestuous and illegitimate state……cut off from the Cameroonian people” (see ‘Introdution; Ecrits sous maquis. Ruben Um Nyobe, Karthala, 1989)
I was imploring President Biya to commit the enormous goodwill that he had accured at his installation to the goal of dismantling the very edifices of El Hadji Ahidjo’s prison-house.
                        Darkness yoked our welling tongues; indeed.
                        We plucked soft lotus petals, wiped our cryptic
                        Tears on scaffolds of apparitions
                        Devising
                        Give me

                        Harvest-Nights, wave-breaking
                        Lifting senile chieftains of mercenary hue, crushed
                        To bone-pastes
                        The stars would come out. Gods
                         Triumph

                        Ah, see, our strength is wild, wild!
                        What ghoul would leave tumuors in his wake, quench
                        Shrapnel’s
                        In our fires to hold the prey, at bay?

I was imploring the then most physically charming and popular architect of “Rigour and Moralisation” to disillusionize the state from the mono-discourse of Gaullian authoritarianism:
                        
                        We will tremble we will sigh: Our Earth! Our Earth!
                        Then the garnering in of smiles
                        After the sacred frogs with their oriental sodomies
                        Indeed when alas! the zombie-sultans
                        Hurtled into the alchemy of the communal kiln
                        (Fire transforms all things to flames)

                        The stars would come out. Gods
                        Triumph. What hoodlums will thug
                        Earth?
                        We would pluck soft lotus petals
                        Drink deep of the elephant  horn:
                        Swagger with a garland-Consider-
                        Of dainty litanies for our Land
                        ….................................
                        On you big scented Cloud with your vermilion
                        Mane of hair
                        Your ride on the back of your mighty elephant

                        Compatriot, you’ll wake gaunt grottoes
                        Heal dormant gravestones, thaw.
                        In the scented air, Walk Harmony into Earth!

                        I dance to your scented guts!

The New Deal regime is a kaleidoscopic dramatization of the decline of visionary chivalry, a prebendal metaphor for the collapse of utopia. Executive lawlessness is the rule rather than the exception.

The whole country has been jolted by the rascality of government customized role models who have allowed the allure of office and filthy lucre to push them to do the most unlawful, most immoral, most indefensible.

The storm is gathering more force and outrage that the barriers of Essingan, tribal omerta, will, no more hold back.

Governance had become a Bermuda Triangle on public funds, with the corruption of a parasitic and prebendal bourgeois elite obvious from their life style, which is in sharp contrast, with the unmitigated destitution that the Cameroonian people face.

It is  dangerous to suggest, or believe, that the President is playing Pontius Pilate to this menacing conspiracy to once more dupe and beguile the Cameroonian polity who have been victims of the Gerard Emmanuel Ondo Ndongs, the Polycarp Abah Abahs, the Gervais Mendo Ze’s  crime and greed.
Yet, if a leader does not know when his sacred, tribal pigeons have been metamorphosed into grinning werewolves with the cruelest and sharpest incisors, then, no worse tragedy could possibly befall a nation.

SCIONS OF THE BETI CABAL (III)
The Cameroonian political system is bedeviled with an extremely high level of criminality. Scions of the Beti cabal have allowed their Nebuchadnezzar-proned ambitions to becloud the overall interest of the Cameroonian people.

The love of these rotten eggs for arbitrariness and willful scorn of judicial pronouncements have reduced our Cameroonian humanity and placed us at par with the community of beasts.
The creation of a bogus National Elections Observatory (NEO) and subsequently Anti-Corruption Units, for instance, was a testimony to the contempt with which the Essingan mandarins held the people.

President Biya has invested without strategies aimed at obtaining lasting solutions that would achieve the desired change in a debauched republic.

Hegemony has been achieved not only by direct manipulation and indoctrination, but by playing upon what Raymond Williams in ‘Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (New York: OUP, 1976), calls their “lived systems of meanings and values.”

The New Deal Regime has become an irritating disappointment to some, a huge embarrassment to others and a source of anger to all.

The lack of faith in our possibilities or potentials of changing the destiny of the nation has become increasingly widespread even among the most gullible but vocal apologists of Renouveau.

PERPETUAL PATRIOTISM (IV)
One of the fundamental driving forces behind the political and economic crisis in the country can be attributed to the denial of basic democratic rights and freedoms.
Democratic exists, or doe not exist.
It is not a mere wish.
We can talk about democracy when it becomes real, the institutions are established, and respected.
Our mode of governance has always been one that fosters instability and insecurity for the society.
Politics has remained as feudalistic and reactionary as ever despite the changing frontiers of the continent’s landscape.

We have all become so familiar with the topography of the trenches that we need no tutorials. Marx and Engels, put it, in this way; “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (See Collected Work, 1976:59)

While the Presidency must have its official think thank, such a body did not derive its authority and ultimate legitimacy from a convergence on a broader collective wisdom.

There are therefore presently two opposing worldviews that seem to dominate Cameroonian political thinking: those of a progressive, democratic modern nation state, and those of the conservative, wholly moribund; conservative status quo with feudal privileges.

Today, the challenges confronting President Biya, then, are manifold. Some of these include the staunching of the nation’s bleeding wounds before it can be stabilized for a major surgical operation; the neutralization of all pernicious influence from tribal conclaves; the promotion of alternative political discourse; the establishment of a strong and independent judiciary and electoral commission; and the immediate repatriation of BOEING LOADS OF LOOTED Cameroonian people’s money from foreign  rogue-vaults.

Comments

[Mobanjn]

Dear prophet of doom , i have been expected your reactions since two weeks ago. You are still in the line of fire . two prophets can never exist at a time

[mobajn]

A sermon is being prepared in your honour .Do not relent your efforts. We will meet you in class and on the street.God saves your days