The Yaoundé initiative that was designed to resolve the crisis in Southern Cameroons, officially known as the Grand National Dialogue, is now, for all practical purposes, dead. Just like the Tripartite in the days of the late Ni John Fru Ndi and the SDF, this deal is no more. It has gone to meet its maker. This is a former deal.

To be sure, the undertaker, significantly, was none other than the senile character currently impersonating as father of the Cameroonian nation.

His name may be Paul Biya, but the 90-year-old Francophone dictator is in fact a combination of different things whose only job is mimicking the words whispered to his earpiece by his young and inexperienced wife Chantal Biya.

Biya’s acolytes say the Grand National Dialogue deal is dead and gone with Cardinal Tumi but Yaoundé is not willing to announce it!  

When he was relatively less senile in the 90s, on his campaign trail, Biya promised that he would personally supervise the construction of the Bamenda ring road.

But the prominent and successful failure has played the spoiler role to perfection and today Cameroon is in chaos.

Now with the numerous coups in Francophone Africa, it is evidently clear that only an intense and productive discussion with the NERA 10 headed by President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe will guarantee peace and prosperity in the Sub Saharan geopolitical chessboard. Russia’s Wagner has reduced France in Africa to an outsize satrapy.

Correspondingly, Dion Ngute’s recent trip to Buea is simply La Republique playing for time before coming up with renewed mischief. Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, Minister-Secretary General at the presidency himself has revealed, on record, that the Grand National Dialogue in Yaoundé was nothing but a gigantic farce.

The Ambazonia Interim Government though never fell into the trap. President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and Vice President Dabney Yerima saw through it from the start: never trust La Republique du Cameroun.

Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his deputy Dabney Yerima intuitively knew that no one deep within the Francophone dominated government in Yaoundé would respect the outcome of the Grand National Dialogue.

Biya and his gang have never made an effort to implement anything positive that came out of the Grand National Dialogue.  The unspoken mantra was to keep the Ambazonia Interim Government down.  

If Biya and his Francophone Beti Ewondo government were really interested from the start in achieving peace with the people of Southern Cameroons, the straightforward path would have been to ditch the current fake unitary system of government and go for federalism.

Instead, they have been using their corrupt pro Yaoundé Southern Cameroons political elites to demand more troops’ deployment to Ambazonia and making a mockery of the Canadian peace initiative.

Ngute’s latest trip to Buea without any Francophone CPDM baron in his delegation is an indication that the Grand National Dialogue is not a priority anymore.

Hence the Blame Ambazonia Game reaching a fever pitch all over in La Republique du Cameroun: Amba Boys are killing innocent people, Amba Boys are involved in kidnapping and extortion and Amba Boys are responsible for the suffering in Southern Cameroons. 

At least now it’s in the open: the only thing that matters for the Biya regime is to dish-out bribes to weak Southern Cameroons leaders and fighters and also to bribe as many traditional rulers as possible forcing them to denounce the Ambazonia uprising.

Nobody will miss the Grand National Dialogue. But what we of the Cameroon Concord News Group want the people of Southern Cameroons to take home is that the decaying Biya regime is an eminently untrustworthy entity.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai