Monthly Archives: December 2020

22, December 2020

Orange Cameroon, MTN Ivory Coast boost 4G connections ⁰

MTN deployed 4.5G in the city of Abidjan to meet rising connectivity demand in the economic capital, while Orange Cameroon increased the speed and capacity of its LTE-A network.

Ecofin Agency reported, MTN’s announcement was made in the commune of Marcory. The operator said 4.5G boasts speeds up to 200Mbps, enabling customers to download a 15-minute video in seven seconds instead of 20 to 30 seconds.

Hyacinthe Seka, MTN Ivory Coast chief technical officer said the technology was launched first in Ivory Coast’s economic capital due to high demand for faster and reliable internet connection, and expansion of 4.5G to other locations will come soon. The construction of the operator’s 4.5G network was financed partly by the CAF40 billion ($74.4 million) in CAPEX the company made during this year, although did not detail how much exactly went into this project.

Orange Cameroon said its ‘4.75G’ LTE-A service was boosted in parts of Cameroon, this service was launched in January this year in a number of locations including: Douala, Yaounde, Mbankomo, Sangmelima, Mbalmayo, Ngaoundere, Bafia, Garoua-Boulai, Bandjoun, Bangangte, Ferme-Suisse, Mbanga, Yop and Mengbwa.

It was developed in conjunction with Finnish vendor Nokia and Orange, both began a major regional rollout of 4G LTE in 2018 to upgrade Orange’s RAN and to enhance mobile internet services, reported TeleGeography’s’ CommsUpdate.

Orange Cameroon chief engineering and network development officer, Abdallah Nassar, told TelecomTV the company trialed ‘fixed broadband’ 700MHz LTE service for enterprises, preparing for launch next year.

Culled from Developing Telecoms

22, December 2020

How much does the president of Cameroon get paid? ⁰

Cameroon’s President for Life reportedly ends – $610,000 / R9.4 million per annum

Paul Biya’s pay cheque clearly indicates the disparity between the salaries of a dictator versus an elected president. Biya has been Cameroon’s leader since 1982, and earns a figure you’d more expect to see come up in the Powerball jackpot than on a pay slip.

The French Cameroun dictator makes roughly 230 times the average Cameroonian salary, and indeed earns more than other world leaders from developed nations, including France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Source: Cajnewsafrica

22, December 2020

Violence in Central African Republic Sends Hundreds Fleeing to Cameroon ⁰

Cameroon says hundreds of Central African Republic (CAR) civilians have fled across the border in the past few days to escape election-related violence. Bangui is holding elections later this month and those fleeing into Cameroon say sporadic clashes are already breaking out.

Local residents say Garoua Boulay’s public square in the past four days has seeing an unusual influx of civilians from neighboring CAR.

Gregoire Mvongo, the governor of Cameroon’s East region which includes Garoua Boulay, says about a thousand people have crossed over into Cameroon since Friday to escape violence in the lead-up to the December 27 poll.

Mvongo said the situation in the CAR is very troubling. He said he traveled to Garoua Boulay Sunday and ordered the military to porous border areas to limit the spill-over into Cameroon from the new wave of fighting.

Among those who fled the CAR is 32-year-old agricultural engineer Jean Paul Nambobona. He says he trekked with his wife and two children through the bush before finding transport to Garua Boulay. He said on the road they saw many people struggling to leave the CAR. He added that he wanted former president Francois Bozize to remember that the CAR has gone through very difficult moments and its civilians want a return to peace.

On Saturday, the CAR government accused Bozize of organizing a rebel alliance to attack the capital, Bangui, a week before the election.

Bangui said U.N. peacekeepers dispersed armed rebels loyal to Bozize who were occupying areas near the capital.

Bozize, whose candidacy for the presidential election was rejected, denied he organized any rebel attack. His opposition coalition on Sunday demanded the election be postponed due to the violence, but the government insisted the vote will go ahead.

Speaking on Radio RCA, self-declared youth leader Rigobert Ngaissio said that young people should not listen to rebels who call for taking up arms against the state.

He said he is calling on all Central Africans, especially the youth, to be vigilant and patriotic because the threats to stability are real and serious. Ngaissio said it is imperative for everyone to contribute to stability in the Central African Republic.

A government spokesman on Monday confirmed reports that Russia and Rwanda had each sent several hundred troops to the country.

Rwanda on Sunday said its troops were dispatched in response to rebels supported by Bozize targeting its peacekeeping forces.

Russia has been supplying the Central African Republic with arms and security contractors.

CAR descended into violence in 2013 when Bozize was ousted by the Séléka, a rebel coalition from the Muslim minority, which accused him of breaking peace deals.

But Bozize maintains a large following, especially in the army and among the country’s largest ethnic group, the Gbaya.

The December 27 election is seen as an important step in bringing stability to the CAR.

In the past seven years of fighting, close to a million Central Africans have fled to neighboring Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.

Source: VOA

21, December 2020

Biya regime preparing for a second round of negotiations with President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe ⁰

President Biya and his French Cameroun political elites are preparing for a second round of negotiations with the leader of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides detained at the Kondengui High Security Prison in Yaoundé. But this time around the regime in Yaoundé needs to get things done and done in a hurry!

Cameroon Intelligence Report gathered that the Biya regime is negotiating with ammo in its pockets and the Francophone dominated government has awarded its army a hefty budget increase.

President Biya’s chief of staff and other senior members of government have reportedly complicated all steps towards reconciliation with the people of Southern Cameroons and pushed the conflict to play into the hands of government hardliners. However, recent Russia troop’s deployment to the Central African Republic has sent panic signals to Yaoundé.

The Central African Republic (CAR) recently declared that Russia and Rwanda have deployed hundreds of troops to the nation following an alleged French sponsored military coup plot ahead of this week’s key presidential and legislative elections.

“Russia has sent several hundred soldiers and heavy weapons” within the framework of a bilateral cooperation agreement, CAR’s government spokesman Ange Maxime Kazagui announced on Monday, adding, “The Rwandans have also sent several hundred men who are on the ground and have started fighting,”

A number of planes from Russia, an ally of CAR’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera, landed in the country over the weekend, Reuters reported Monday, citing unidentified sources.

The presence of Russian troops in the Central African Republic is an indication that France is slowly but surely losing its grip on the CEMAC region. Correspondingly, the Cameroon Francophone army over the last four years has been struggling to find a way out of the war in Southern Cameroons with a Commander-in-Chief who continues to rely on a small set of generals and military advisors from his Beti-Ewondo tribal extraction.

By Isong Asu and Chi Prudence Asong

21, December 2020

UN peacekeepers say rebel push in Central African Republic ‘under control’ ⁰

Rebel forces advancing on the Central African Republic’s capital Bangui have been pushed back and the situation is “under control”, a spokesman for UN peacekeeping forces said Sunday, as tensions mount a week before key elections.

The government had alleged an attempted coup when three of the powerful armed groups that control most of the country’s territory began advancing towards the capital along critical main roads, ahead of presidential and legislative elections scheduled for December 27.

Earlier Sunday, the Coalition of the Democratic Opposition (COD-2020) called for the votes to be postponed “until the re-establishment of peace and security”.

Uniting the main parties and movements opposed to President Faustin-Archange Touadera, COD-2020 was until recently led by former president Francois Bozize, who the government said Saturday was at the head of rebel fighters massing not far from the capital.

Vladimir Monteiro, spokesman for the UN’s MINUSCA peacekeeping force, told AFP Sunday that “the armed groups have left the town” of Yaloke, on one of the routes towards Bangui, and that they had given up ground in two other areas.

MINUSCA “sent blue helmets to Mbaiki, where there were clashes on Saturday… to block the armed groups,” Monteiro added, saying “the situation is under control”.

But security and humanitarian sources said that parts of the armed groups were still on the ground around Bossembele — around 150 kilometres (90 miles) from Bangui.

The government had said Saturday that former president Bozize was at Bossembele with fighters from three rebel groups which announced a coalition on Saturday called the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC).

They urged members to “scrupulously respect the integrity of the civilian population” and to allow vehicles belonging to the United Nations and to humanitarian groups to circulate freely in the former French colony.

In a joint statement, a group known as the G5+ — France, Russia, the US, the EU and the World Bank — urged Bozize and allied armed groups to lay down their arms, calling for the elections to go ahead on December 27.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for calm and called on all sides to ensure credible elections and peace.

And the 11,000-strong MINUSCA force warned Saturday it would “use all means at its disposal including planes to prevent violence.”

‘Why take up arms?‘

Meanwhile, Bozize’s KNK party denied the former leader wanted to carry out a putsch.

“We categorically deny that Bozize is at the origin of anything,” Christian Guenebem, a spokesman for his KNK party, told AFP.

“The government has always wanted to undermine the physical and political integrity of Bozize.”

“Why take up arms against your countrymen?” Touadera asked at a rally in Bangui Saturday.

“The national election authority and Constitutional Court have guaranteed that the elections will be held as scheduled,” added the president, who is widely expected to win re-election.

Bozize, back after years in exile, has been barred from running in the election by the coup-prone country’s top court, as the CAR had sought him with an international arrest warrant on charges including murder, arbitrary arrest and torture.

The 74-year-old, who came to power in a coup in 2003 before himself being overthrown in 2013, said last Tuesday that he accepted the court’s decision.

The CAR spiralled into conflict when Bozize, a Christian, was ousted as president by the Seleka, a rebel coalition drawn largely from the Muslim minority.

That coup triggered a bloodbath between the Seleka and so-called “anti-Balaka” self-defence forces, mainly Christian and animist.

France sent its army to intervene, and after a transitional period, elections were staged in 2016 and won by Touadera.

Source: AFP

21, December 2020

US: Elections becomes a laughing stock as Trump takes fight over Biden’s win to Supreme Court ⁰

US President Donald Trump has launched his latest long-shot effort to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, saying he would again ask the Supreme Court to overturn results from the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Trump’s campaign said it filed a petition asking the high court to reverse three rulings by a Pennsylvania state court interpreting the state’s rules for mail-in ballots.

The campaign said a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases “illegally changed Pennsylvania’s mail balloting law immediately before and after the 2020 presidential election.”

“This petition follows a related Pennsylvania case in which Justice Alito and two other justices observed ‘the constitutionality of the [Pennsylvania] Supreme Court’s decision [extending the statutory deadline for receipt of mail ballots from 8 pm on election day to 5 pm three days later] … has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution”, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said in the campaign statement.

The actual rulings include prohibiting election officials from checking whether signatures on mail-in ballots are genuine during canvassing on Election Day and eliminating the right of campaign’s to challenge mail ballots during canvassing for forged signatures and other irregularities.

“Collectively, these three decisions resulted in counting approximately 2.6 million mail ballots in violation of the law as enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature,” Trump’s attorney John Eastman wrote in the filing.

Congress is set to formally tally the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 and Biden will take office on Jan. 20.

The petition came days after Democrat Joe Biden won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232 and defeated the Republican president by more than 7 million ballots in the popular vote. A candidate needs 270 of those votes.

Trump has refused to concede and continues his battle to overturn election results in several battleground states.

The Supreme Court on Dec. 11 rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states, including Pennsylvania that went for Biden.

Trump says widespread electoral fraud has taken place and has tried but failed to overturn Biden’s victory, pressing state officials, lawmakers and governors to throw the results out.

Several senior Republican US senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have acknowledged Biden as the country’s president-elect after the Electoral College affirmed his victory.

Source: Presstv

20, December 2020

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Bishop Nkuo says Christmas ‘very difficult’ when people being killed ⁰

As Christmas approaches, a Cameroonian bishop whose diocese has been engulfed in the country’s Anglophone crisis hopes it will bring a period of peace to the region.

“The coming of Christ this year 2020 will have a very significant meaning for the people of God in Kumbo,” Bishop George Nkuo told Crux. Kumbo is located in Cameroon’s English-speaking Northwest Region.

The Anglophone crisis began in 2017, after teachers and lawyers went on strike over perceived attempts by the central government to assimilate the common law and English education systems Cameroon’s Anglophone regions inherited from their previous British colonial government. The two English-speaking regions contain about 20 percent of the country’s population. The rest of Cameroon is Francophone, and inherited France’s civil code legal system, and French educational system.

The strikes were violently suppressed, giving rise to a separatist movement attempting to establish an independent state to be known as Ambazonia.

At least 3000 people have been killed in the conflict, and more than a million forced from their homes.

“It’s nearly five years now our people have experienced one of the horrors of a senseless war, hatred and enormous suffering. It’s very difficult to preach a message of peace, of love, of reconciliation, of justice and of fraternity when daily people are killed, homes are destroyed, pain is inflicted on innocent people and the forces of darkness seem to be overwhelmingly in control,” Nkuo said.

“Yet the birth of Christ assures us that evil cannot have the last word,” he said.

“We need to come up with a powerful message and a prophetic witness that can move our people to a faith in Jesus who gives them love, peace, healing and joy in the simple vulnerable signs that surround the birth of Christ. This is a challenging task and as ministers of the Gospel we must find ways to help our people experience Jesus born among us in our hopelessness and suffering,” he said.

The world was shocked when on Oct. 24, attackers armed with guns and machetes stormed Mother Francisca Memorial College in Kumba – located in the Southwest Region, the other Anglophone province in Cameroon – killing at least seven students and wounding a dozen others.

Government officials blamed Anglophone separatists for the attack, although they denied responsibility. The separatists have insisted that all schools in the Anglophone regions remain closed and have been enforcing their decree by burning schools and kidnapping teachers and students from any institution that defies them.

Carine Bongadzem, a member of the Catholic Women’s Association in Yaounde, told Crux that because “Jesus is justice and peace,” her request is for justice to take its course “so that peace should reign in my homeland.”

Kiven Brenda, another member of the association, said she believes Christ’s coming would be a time of forgiveness and national cleansing.

“My first request is for God to forgive us all, have mercy on us,” she told Crux.

“We have sinned against Him and we are reaping the consequences. I wish he can intervene and calm down heart’s, reduce egos, give wisdom to our leaders, so that we can have peace in the Anglophone regions,” she added.

Tensions in the country have been rising since Dec. 6 regional elections that the separatists boycotted. The rebels threatened any traditional rulers that took part, and at least four have been kidnapped and one killed since the vote.

Last month, Cardinal Christian Tumi, the 90-year-old retired archbishop of Douala, was kidnapped and held for a day by separatist after accompanying a traditional leader of his home village of Nso in the country’s Northwest Region. The cardinal and the traditional ruler, along with nine members of their delegation, were traveling from the capital Yaoundé to Kumbo when they were abducted.

Source: VOA

20, December 2020

Cargo ship hijacked en route from Ghana to Cameroon ⁰

A container ship owned by A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S was attacked off the West African coast, prompting the company to warn of a rising risk from piracy in the area.

The Maersk Cadiz was boarded by “criminals” on Saturday at about 2:30 p.m. Nigeria time while traveling from Tema in Ghana to Kribi in Cameroon, Maersk said in a statement. Nigerian naval ships have arrived to help the vessel, which can transport the equivalent of as many as 4,500 twenty-foot containers.

All 21 crew have been confirmed as safe, and the vessel has been secured, a spokeswoman for Copenhagen-based Maersk said. The ship was carrying cargo when attacked.

The boarding of the Maersk Cadiz follows an attack on another Maersk container ship near the West African nation of Guinea in February. That vessel, known at the time as the Maersk Tema, was owned and operated by two German companies.

The West African coast overtook Southeast Asia last year as the worst area for reported piracy and kidnappings at sea, with the number of seafarers seized rising by more than 50%, according to a study. Despite a global decline in piracy in 2019, attacks have continued in the Gulf of Guinea this year, especially off Nigeria’s coast.

“We are very concerned about the increased security risk from armed attacks on merchant vessels in the area,” Maersk Chief Technical Officer Palle Laursen said in a statement. “The risk has reached a level where local governments and the international community must take action to deal effectively with an unacceptable situation.”

The Maersk Cadiz was built in 2013 and sails under the Singaporean flag.

Source: Bloomberg.com

20, December 2020

Biya Regime Says Boko Haram Infiltrates Top Business and Political Leaders ⁰

A Cameroonian official said Friday he had found evidence that, as widely suspected, Boko Haram militants have been establishing close ties in Cameroonian political and business circles. The revelation came after Cameroon’s military arrested a former lawmaker for allegedly supplying cattle to the Nigerian terrorist group.

Midjiyawa Bakari, governor of Cameroon’s Far North region, on Nigeria’s border, says that within the past two months, Boko Haram has been establishing ties with top officials of his region. He spoke via a messaging app from the northern town of Maroua.

He says security reports indicate that Boko Haram has infiltrated some political, business and elite circles along Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria. He says Boko Haram accomplices in the communities supply food and money for the terrorists to procure weapons. Bakari says the military has been assigned to arrest those who have established ties with Boko Haram.

Bakari did not say how many people have been arrested for establishing ties with the terrorist group, but this week, local media reported the arrest by Cameroon’s military of a former member of parliament, Blama Malla, for alleged ties with the Boko Haram. He has been detained in the northern town of Mora.

The media reports that Malla, a member of President Paul Biya’s ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement party, is accused of supplying cattle and money to Boko Haram.

Malla was arrested after his cousin, a member of a local militia in the border town of Kolofata in the Mayo Sava administrative unit, was seen transporting 10 cattle to a border area where Boko Haram fighters hide. He was arrested by the military. Local media said the cousin confessed that he had received orders from Malla to supply the cattle to Boko Haram.

The government has not issued a statement. VOA could not independently confirm his account.

Retired Colonel Didier Bajeck, a security specialist and former Cameroon defense spokesperson, says while the military is stepping up intelligence to arrest the suspects, civilians should be on the alert.

Bajeck says it is imperative for civilians to inform the military of the presence of strange people in their areas. It is also important, he says, that civilians report their neighbors who invite suspected Boko Haram members. He says civilians may not know of financial transactions between suspects and Boko Haram, but that the population should immediately call the military when they see food and cattle being transported to the bush, where terrorists may be hiding.

Ejani Leonard Kulu, a political analyst at the University of Dschang in Cameroon, says Boko Haram has historically had ties with some top business figures and politicians in Nigeria. He says it is the same situation in Cameroon.

“Nigeria and Cameroon share so much ties together, cultural, religious ties, socio-economic ties,” Kulu said. “Boko Haram in its modus operandi infiltrates the society, touch key persons at different areas. So it is something that has been a routine in Nigeria and in Cameroon when the president of the National Assembly said, “Il y a les Boko Haram parmi nous,” such an information was not supposed to be taken lightly because these are people who are highly informed.”

The “Il y a les Boko Haram parmi nous” that Kulu refers to means there are Boko Haram members in our midst. It is a statement made in 2018 by Cavaye Yegui Djibril, speaker of Cameroon’s National Assembly during a plenary session. At the time, Malla was still a lawmaker from the Mayo Sava administrative unit. Djibrli did not specify names.

Kulu said the government should not have taken such a statement lightly.

Cameroon has also always accused Boko Haram of infiltrating militias created to fight the terrorists.

Boko Haram terrorists have been fighting for 11 years to create an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria. The fighting has spread to Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin, with regular killings, abductions and burnings of mosques, churches, markets and schools.

The United Nations reports that Boko Haram violence has cost the lives of 30,000 people and displaced about 2 million in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

Source: VOA

20, December 2020

PROTESTING THE SDF CHAIRMAN’S INSOLENCE TOWARDS JOURNALISTS AND BODY-SHAMING OF A FEMALE JOURNALIST ⁰

We, associations of English-speaking journalists and defenders of woman’s rights, condemn the verbal assault and insults by the SDF Chairman, Mr John Fru Ndi, on two journalists, including a woman, during a press conference in Yaounde on December 12, 2020, as reported by The Guardian Post No. 2034 of December 14, 2020, and demand an immediate apology from him.

The party Chairman’s utterances gave a sense of the same condemnable attitude of undermining the Press, a vital corps in the socio-political and socio-economic development of society by politicians in power and those still in the opposition.

We have keenly listened to an audio clip of the entire press conference circulating on social media and we heard our colleague, Ebenezer Akanga, who works for CRTV, the state TV broadcaster, ask the Chairman whether he did not think his party ought to share in the blame for the electoral predicament his party was deploring at the press conference.

As the watchdogs of society and mediators of the socio-political landscape with a duty to hold public personalities to account, we simply expected the SDF Chairman to admit Akanga’s claim or deny it with explanations. We are shocked at his bad-tempered response and the uncivil badmouthing of our colleagues. Nothing in the audio recording of the press conference suggested nor justified Fru Ndi’s “shut up your mouth, shut up your mouth” assault on our colleague.

Protesting the incident, our colleague, Franklin Sone Bayen, Executive Secretary of both CReAM (Come and Redeem Anglophone Media Practice) and CiJA (Courage in Journalism Awards) says, “A politician who tells a journalist to shut up would shut up journalists by locking them up if such a politician ever got to power.” That is disquieting to us.

Commenting on the brawl, Akanga says, “I felt humiliated to be insulted in public and infront of my colleagues simply for asking a question as a journalist. At my own small level, I have decided that I will not go to cover any activity of the SDF again.”

Reacting to another incident at the same press conference where Fru Ndi described a female journalist, Annie Babele who works for The Post newspaper, as “very ugly”, our colleague, Commy Mussa, CEO of a women’s rights organization, Sisterspeak237, says by so doing the SDF Chairman knowingly or unknowingly promoted “the tradition of denigrating women in media by criticizing their appearance rather than their work.

“Such attacks can reinforce gender norms, create pressure for women to present themselves attractively (with “attractiveness” defined by men, of course), and even persuade some women to stay out of the public sphere altogether,” Mussa underscored.

“Verbal abuse from a top ranking personality on a fellow woman irrespective of the circumstances and context, is totally unacceptable because it is from them that we expect to see good examples.”

While still evaluating the possible short-term and long-term consequences of the Chairman’s action on our corps and on the said individuals and considering any action we may take in the future, we demand an immediate apology from Chairman Fru Ndi to the individuals and the Press Corps in general and hope this type of arrogance towards the Press will cease forthwith.

Done in Yaounde, this 16th day of December 2020

Signed:

-Cameroon Association of English-speaking Journalists (CAMASEJ)

-Cameroon Community Media Network (CCMN)

-Come and Redeem Anglophone Media Practice (CReAM)

-Courage in Journalism Awards (CiJA)

-Association of Combined Action to Protect and Empower Journalists (ACAPEJ)