By Bate Besong
Churchill Ewumbue Monono. MEN OF COURAGE: The Participation of Independent and Civil Society Candidates in the Electoral Process in Cameroon. A Historical Perspective, 1945-2004. Limbe; Design House, 2006. 237 pages.
Churchill Ewumbue Monono’s MEN OF COURAGE has attracted my current analytical exploratory exercise, because the author’s quest, I am convinced, is to show that MINAT’s goal under Andre Tschoungui and subsequently Marafa Hamidou Yaya has been, to install, the medieval monster named ELECAM, a nervous condition of megalomania that would eventually efface a democratic culture, in Cameroon, with Paul Biya as Life President and “God.”
It is therefore not surprising that Churchill Ewumbue-Monono’s research challenges the party-centered elections, which are not only anti-constitutional and ahistorical, but also in contradiction with the organic law on political parties, which makes membership in political parties optional. The author indirectly posits that the present faustian, jeremiads of PM Ephraim Inoni and Marafa Hamidou Yaya, his Minister of Territorial Administration, is not founded on the country’s democratic traditions, political culture, and even political history of either Anglophone or Francophone Cameroon.
Modeled after the American President, John Fritzgerald Kennedy (1908-1963) Pulitzer prize-winning PROFILES IN COURAGE, in which J.F.K referred to great men in American history who defied the odds to individually fight against dominant societal prejudices, ideologies, and opinions, and in the process ended up changing the course of history for their country, Ewumbue-Monono, in turn, celebrates Cameroonian pearls of freedom who, as independent and civil society politicians have left an indelible imprint on party recruitments, improvement on the quality of the opposition, management of political institutions and participation in political reform (p. 23).
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