The mayor of Mamfe, Presley Ojong was heading to his village Eshobi some few miles from the chief town in the Manyu County. Two heavily armed soldiers from the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) provided security for him en route to Eshobi.

They crossed the Satom Bridge and took the main road destined for Eshobi. The Senior Divisional Officer for Manyu and the Commander of the Besongabang regiment were all aware of the mayor’s trip.

The mayor had no reason to request for more soldiers as he was going to an area where his people were celebrating him as the first prominent figure in Manyu from Eshobi after the renowned veteran journalist Lawrence EyongEchaw.

Rising concerns about the mayor’s own security came deep inside Mamfe town and from CPDM bigwigs who had vowed never to allow an Eshobi person to be mayor.

The trip to Eshobi would be Mayor Ojong’s last. Bullets fired from an AK47 killed him and wounded the two soldiers in his entourage. The bullets were aimed at him only.

There has not been any Cameroon government investigation into the attack that killed the mayor and soldiers have still not been deployed to the area.

The Francophone administration in the Manyu County reportedly blamed the attack on a Southern Cameroons activist based in the USA.

Cameroon Intelligence Report have focused its investigation on the Mamfe Council politics and we can now reveal that highly placed Manyu CPDM party officials used their informants inside Mamfe and Egbekaw village collaborated with gun men passing for Ambazonia Restoration Forces to help track and pinpoint the mayor’s position, according to interviews we conducted with four political rivals of the late mayor (names withheld).

Our senior correspondent in Buea who is presently in Manyu leading the investigation hinted that the scantily attended funeral ceremony organized in loving memory of the mayor with posters blaming the attack on Eric Tataw and the Manyu diaspora in the USA are all attempts at covering up strong indications that a Manyu CPDM network of armed militia were involved in the killing of the mayor.

This item is still developing

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with Intelligence files from Mamfe

As the Coronavirus spreads across the world and threatens the global economy, many are concerned about their future and this fear has caused many communities to take urgent actions to keep the virus at bay.

In Cameroon, most confirmed cases of the virus are concentrated in the country’s two major cities – Douala and Yaoundé – and this is concerning to the government which fears that it might be hard to check the spread of the insidious virus in such densely populated cities.

But other cities are not waiting for the virus to come to them before they can start to take necessary precautions and actions.

In Manyu County, Amba boys are now issuing resident permits to locals and anybody who comes into the Division without their authorisation will face the wrath of the law.

They have stepped up their checks and many check-points have been erected between Mamfe and Kumba as well as between Mamfe and Bamenda.

Any driver who carries a passenger without a resident permit to Mamfe will be flogged at the check-point and the passenger will be pulled out of the car and sent back to wherever he or she came from. The undocumented passenger is advised not to return to the Division until the world finds a cure against the Coronavirus.

According to a source close to the fighters, these measures are designed to protect the population and the fighters themselves who understand that if a single super spreader makes his way to the Division, thousands will perish, including the fighters themselves.

As usual, there is panic in towns and villages in the Division, as movement is highly restricted. The fighters, like government officials, are concerned about the arrival of the virus and health authorities are doing a great job to sensitize the population.

Besides initiatives by the government to check the spread of the virus, individual communities and villages have organized their own initiatives to raise awareness of the virus.

In Ossing, a town some 7 km from Mamfe town, residents received hand sanitizers and masks sent by some goodwill citizens of the town who are resident in other cities of the country.

Each quarter head collected the COVID-19 related materials and they are expected to help sensitize the population on how to avoid the virus.

Other towns in the division will soon witness sensitization campaigns as their elites and the Diaspora are working hard to ensure that preventive measures are taken to keep the virus far from the towns and villages of Manyu Division.

COVID-19 might be bad news to many people around the world, but the fear of this virus has resulted in greater cooperation and collaboration among many communities and towns around Manyu Division.

If these communities continue to conduct sensitization campaigns and comply with WHO protocols on how to check the spread of the virus, Manyu Division will remain COVID-19-free.

Though from time to time there are clashes between the soldiers and Amba fighters, there appears to be an understanding that the various factions have an interest in keeping the deadly virus far from Manyu Division.

The soldiers and Amba boys seem to be playing different, but complementary roles when it comes to defeating the virus.

While Amba boys are making sure that no carriers slip into the Division, government soldier are, for their part, helping administrative and medical authorities in their efforts to raise awareness of the virus.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Top medics from the CNPS hospital in Yaoundé were helicoptered last night to Mvomeka’a for a medical evaluation and treatment of French Cameroun’s longtime head of state Paul Biya after what was described by Cameroon Intelligence Report sources as a minor stroke.

CIR contacts also revealed that President Biya may be flown abroad anytime soon to undergo supplementary medical examination but the Francophone dominated government is withholding news of Mr Biya’s condition.

Despite numerous assurances about President Biya’s bill of health, his prime minister and head of government Dion Ngute was ordered by the presidency to announce emergency COVID-19 rules which includes terms and conditions for the reopening of schools and Coronavirus control measures for 15 days (renewable).

At the time of filing this report, an aide to the president confirmed to our Yaoundé city reporter that the president felt unwell but his condition is not serious at all.  He added that initial examinations were done late yesterday and the French Cameroun Monarch will return to Yaoundé this coming week adding that his health does not cause any concern.

French and Southern Cameroonians including experts of the CEMAC region worry about the country’s stability should the 87-year-old Paul Biya depart from the political scene. He has served as head of state since 1982 despite persistent youth unemployment and corruption allegations.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

In November 2016, protests against French majority rule in Cameroon’s English-speaking northwest and southwest regions broke out. Protesters amplified demands by Anglophone lawyers and teachers to have the Common Law and the English education system in their regions.

Cameroon’s English-speaking minority makes up 20 percent of the country while the French-speaking majority makes up the other 80 percent.

These protests relied on social media  — especially Facebook — to mobilize and inform.

The Francophone government’s crackdown on these protests led to a three-year separatist war — largely driven by identity and language politics — known as the Anglophone crisis.

Throughout this crisis, online attacks and identity-driven hate speech continue to stifle freedom of expression.

Clashes between separatist groups and state police and military have led to at least 2,000 deaths and about 500,000 people displaced. English-speaking separatist groups in southern Cameroon seek to break from French-majority Cameroon and create Ambazonia, a new nation.

Internet shutdown

In October 2016, a month before the protests began, the government had come under intense criticism on social media for the way it managed a train accident in the small town of Eseka, central Cameroon, that claimed the lives of more than 80 people and injured 600.

In response, the government unleashed a campaign against the dangers of social media. The state-controlled newspaper Cameroon Tribune said social media was “fast becoming a threat to peace and a secret instrument of manipulation,” advancing “character destruction, destabilization of public opinion and deformation of facts among others.”

By January 2017, the West African nation shut down the internet in its English-speaking regions for more than a year. The internet blackout — which lasted until March 2018 — occurred after stockpiles of images of torture and death appeared online that the government wanted to suppress.

This did not only starve internet users of information — the majority of whom are young people — but it also contravened a resolution adopted by the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council in 2017 on the ‘’the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet.’’

The resolution condemned disruptions to internet access and ‘’affirms that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online,” in particular freedom of expression.

Language and identity politics

For decades, Cameroon has been locked into numerous, heated debates on how both English and French-speaking cultures and languages can be more equitably represented in public spaces.

The country merged with English and French languages and cultures after World War I, when Britain and France took over the then-German colony, after expelling Germany from the territory through the war.

French Cameroon attained its independence in 1961 as La Republique du Cameroun (Republic of Cameroon) and British Cameroon voted to join the republic to form the two-state Federal Republic of Cameroon in 1961.

Nevertheless, the first President of Cameroon Ahmadou Ahidjo, who ruled from 1961 to 1982, dissolved the federal system in 1972.

The result is 10 regions comprising Cameroon today, with eight French-speaking and two English-speaking.

“We have a WhatsApp group about sports news in Cameroon,” Samuel, a sports journalist told Global Voices on March 5 in Yaoundé, the capital. Samuel is an English-speaking Cameroonian from Southwest, an Anglophone region, who asked Global Voices to withhold his full identity for fear of repression:

Often we get official documents from federations in French. When my English colleagues ask why it is like that, most French colleagues hit back, saying tu dois etre bilingue [‘you need to be bilingual’] – le Cameroun est bilingue [‘Cameroon is bilingual’]. The funniest thing is that they can’t even read documents in English. We will quarrel and even lose track of the essence of the document at times – that’s how English journalists struggle for our identity in this country.

Last year, lawmakers in Cameroon pushed for a bill to reinforce the equal use of English and French as seen in Article 1(3) of the country’s constitution.

According to the law, court orders can be rendered in either of Cameroon’s two official languages, English and French, — subject to the choice of actors involved. But some English-speaking lawyers fear this may lead to assimilation. Instead, Anglophone citizens want English in Common Law courts across their regions.

Online trolls

Journalists in Cameroon have had to be very careful about reporting on atrocities related to the country’s long-running separatist war. Appearing to side with separatists or the government too strongly can lead to attacks by online trolls on either side.

“I have received a number of attacks on Facebook because of my work,” said Kehdinga Fabrice, a journalist with The Guardian Post in southwest Cameroon, who spoke with Global Voices on March 6. “An issue of The Guardian Post was posted [on Facebook] and somebody came and commented and I reacted to the person’s comment. He insulted me on the platform and even wrote me a private message describing me as a ‘government agent’,” Kehdinga said.

Facebook, where close to half of the country’s 8 million social media users have accounts, is a site where online attacks occur most frequently.

Kehdinga told Global Voices:

It’s a normal phenomenon … if a frontpage newspaper gives a positive side of separatists, we are attacked — it’s the same scenario if we write on the side of the government. People send me messages [to my] inbox and even threaten me. Now I just read Facebook posts without commenting to be on the safe side.

Ethnicity provokes online abuse

In February 2020, Cameroon held its annual race on Mount Cameroon in the town of Buea, an English-speaking city in the southwest region of the country.

Runners from the northwest region, the second of Cameroon’s two Anglophone provinces, competed against Fako people, an ethnic group in the southwest, who worship the deity Epas’a Moto.

Most of the winners of the Mount Cameroon Race of Hope hailed from the northwest.

Editors from The Median newspaper posted a banner on Facebook with the headline: “Mt. Cameroon Race of Hope: NW Athletes Rubbish Epas’a Moto, Carry Away Tens of Millions.”

The headline implies that competitors from the northwest outsmarted Fako athletes and despised their deity Epas’a Moto, to win big.

The word “rubbish” did not go down well on Facebook: Many readers saw the headline as an abusive jab toward Fako people and their beliefs. It provoked numerous negative comments:

John Ndumbe commented:

Idiot! Do you know that NW [northwest] has 100 tribes? If they win the mountain race so what? Has Manyu [another tribal group] ever won a trophy despite their Nyankpes and leopards?

Eileen Tabuwe Akwo commented:

Was Epas’a Moto in competition or against the athletes? All gods as we know are impartial and defend the pure of heart. By allowing this headline, The Median is supporting a wrongful insult. Let’s rethink our journalism.

Facebook’s Community Standards mandate taking down posts that incite hate speech and abuse. The post, however, remains online. Additionally, at the government level, there’s no clear follow-up on social media abuse.

In response to increasing hate speech online, the parliament prepared a bill on hate speech and tribalism in November 2019 and President Paul Biya legislated the bill into law in December 2019. Defaulters will be fined about 3 million Central African Francs or approximately $5,000 United States dollars and could serve three years in prison, depending on the gravity of the crime.

However, the government only cracks down on violators when it concerns its institutions or personalities, according to human rights lawyer Barrister Felix Agbor Balla, who was charged with terrorism in the wake of the Anglophone crisis.

Agbor Balla told Global Voices on March 27:

The problem with government is that they politicize it – they use it when it is convenient for them. When people use [hate speech] against people who are against the government — nobody cares.

By January 2019, Cameroon was ranked among the top 15 users of Facebook in Africa which means the majority of its population uses the popular social media platform.

“Cameroon needs a robust agreement with Facebook —  for them to be a watchdog that any message that is an attack is pulled down,” Agbor Balla said.

Source: Global Voices

Police in Cameroon have detained several hundred people for not wearing face masks in public, as COVID-19 cases in the central African state continue to rise.

Seventeen-year-old David Ngwa Fru said a team of police and gendarmes detained him and his two younger sisters in the capital, Yaounde, on Thursday morning.

“The police removed us from a taxi on our way to the market because we were not wearing our masks. They detained us at the police station for three hours. We paid 2,000 (each) before we were released. Many people who did not pay the money are still there.”

Fru, speaking to VOA through a messaging app, said that although they were not issued any receipts, the police told them that the $9 he and his siblings paid were fines for not wearing their masks, and assured them that the money would be sent to the state treasury.

A health worker wearing protective equipment, disinfects a member of medical staff amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at an hospital in Douala, Cameroon, April 27, 2020.

Police official Oswald Ateba said officers are implementing a Cameroon government order that everyone in public must wear a face mask as of 6 a.m. Thursday.

He said they have been instructed to arrest everyone found along the streets, markets, bars and popular spots without masks and to impound all vehicles and motorcycles that are seen with drivers and passengers not wearing masks.

The police said authorities have detained hundreds of people, seized 250 motorcycles and impounded hundreds of taxis in Yaounde alone as part of efforts to implement the new rules.

Government spokesperson Rene Emmanuel Sadi said the decision to make arrests came after lockdown restrictions were eased, but a majority of Cameroonians were not wearing masks.

He said the government is also battling the growing stigmatization of people testing positive for COVID-19 and those who have recovered from the disease, stressing that COVID-19 is neither shameful nor a curse and any person can be contaminated.

Cameroon has about 3,000 reported cases of COVID-19 and has recorded 139 deaths.

Even though the government has eased the strict lockdown measures, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute said on Wednesday no one should think that COVID-19 has been conquered in the central African state. 

Source: VOA