Press Statement: Update on Decisive Action(s) taken against the splinter group of SOBA UK

Fellow Sobans,   On 24th February 2018, the members of the SOBA UK General Assembly convened and voted unanimously to:

a) reject calls for fresh elections in the UK by SOBA General in Cameroon and,

b) take necessary actions to redress any infringement of the SOBA UK trade marks.

We repeat that SOBA UK has for some time now been the subject of sustained attack from the activities of members of the splinter group purporting to be SOBA UK, which is a clear infringement of our intellectual property and disregard for the already well established association in the United Kingdom.

Exactly two weeks ago on 8th June 2018 we informed you that the Executive of SOBA UK had commenced decisive action against certain individuals of the splinter group. We outlined specific activities that demonstrated bad faith, opportunism and collusion with key elements of SOBA General in Cameroon, notably Prof Ephraim Ngwafor and Mr Ebot Mfoataw to undermine the SOBA UK General Assembly of registered members.

The actions initiated so far are focused on recovering intellectual property that belongs to SOBA UK in an attempt to resolve the confusing situation amongst members of the public of the splinter group also calling themselves SOBA UK instead of using an alternative name and freely associating as they see fit.    The said individuals of the splinter group were contacted by our legal representative and given a period of two weeks to return SOBA UK’s intellectual property and to stop purporting to be SOBA UK. We regret to inform you that our legal representative informed us at close of play Friday 22nd June, 2018 that these individuals had failed to meet the requirements of our requests.    Instead of doing everything possible to remove themselves from what is a very serious and urgent situation, the said individuals provided a lengthy and misleading write-up that did not address the specifics of what they had been accused of. Furthermore, the write-up shows deep collusion between the splinter group and Prof. Ephraim Ngwafor and the dubious plan to attempt to usurp the legitimate association of SOBA UK members. We have taken the exceptional step of publishing the write-up so that this collusion can be evidenced to our membership.

From the write-up provided, extracts of SOBA General constitution (separate from the SOBA UK constitution) amended by Professor Ephraim Ngwafor show material changes to the 2018 SOBA Constitution that could in theory affect all Soban groups worldwide. These most recent changes have been made without due consultation or ratification from the SOBA UK General Assembly. It is obvious that these changes have been done in an effort to prop up the splinter group in the UK and seek control of SOBA UK and its assets, both financial and otherwise. Specifically, amending the constitution to create the so called SOBA General Council that gives it powers to dissolve any elected Executive of SOBA anywhere in the world and appoint an election commission and its members, is a gross abuse of the goodwill of Sobans to freely associate around the world.

On behalf of our registered members in the UK, considering no ratification of such dubious constitutional changes, the nonpayment of any registration into SOBA in Cameroon, our obligations from the SOBA UK Constitution, the SOBA UK General Assembly, our ownership of UK trademarks and autonomy, we are making it clear that these constitutional changes by Prof Ephraim Ngwafor in SOBA are null and void, and will not stand the scrutiny of any court in the UK.

On the intellectual property in the UK, we the members of SOBA UK, live in the UK, freely and voluntarily associate and do business in the UK and own the intellectual property in the UK in order to protect SOBA UK and avoid confusion in the public and abuse of our UK brand name. The process of achieving a trade mark was not taken lightly by us or by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO). For a legitimate group that had demonstrated hard-work, track record of operating and doing its business over many years in the United Kingdom, the evidence was and continues to be available in abundance for the award of our trade marks in the UK. Our trademarks have been evidenced by certificates and TM numbers which are made available to anyone who wishes to verify online. Those who believe they can challenge these facts with their alternative version of doing business in the UK are more than welcomed to do so. Our members however, remain very confident of their standing and brand name in the UK.

There has been a narrative provided by Prof Ephraim Ngwafor that his firm has achieved trade marks for SOBA with the African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI) but with no trade mark numbers or certificates provided. Whilst this does not strictly concern us in the UK, we have reasonable grounds to believe that no such trademarks have been achieved as of this date and this irresponsibly exposes SOBA in the African region. The OAPI is part of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and they follow the same standards of issuing trade mark evidences as the UK IPO. It is also worth noting that even with such a trade mark from OAPI it would not cover business undertaken outside the region and certainly not in the United Kingdom. Therefore these misleading statements about the intellectual property rights of SOBA UK are totally baseless and our members should remain very confident from many years participation in legitimate SOBA UK activities.

Finally, the failure of the said individuals of the splinter group to adhere to the deadline set by our legal representatives is regrettable because of the potential consequences to them of now pursuing these matters fully through the legal system. The various cases brought against the individuals by members of SOBA UK are founded on solid evidence. We strongly advice those concerned to consider the potential impact to their individual circumstances first and respond to the reasonable requests from our members.    We will keep you posted in the coming weeks, as we remain hopeful of achieving a reasonable conclusion to these matters.

Yours faithfully,

John Bawak

Secretary General SOBA UK

On behalf of Executive and Members of SOBA UK Signed:

On the 24th day of June 2018 United Kingdom.

It is a bright Tuesday morning, with children hawking goods to drivers and passersby on the congested streets of Yaounde. The number of these sidewalk sellers is increasing with the ongoing conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking northwest and southwest regions, where fighting between armed separatists and government troops has shut down schools and sent thousands of children fleeing to safer ground.

Among the sidewalk peddlers is 16-year-old Delphine Tabe. She says she has been a hawker for more than a year since she fled from her village in Lebialem, an administrative unit in the southwest.

“I am selling boiled groundnuts to have money and help my mother who is in the hospital. She was beaten by Cameroon gendarmes after a military man was killed in our village. My mother almost died. Our school was burned and students were beaten. Since that day in May 2017, we escaped to Yaounde and we do not have money to go to school.”

Delphine says her chances of pursuing her dream – becoming a teacher – are gradually slipping away as she has no one to sponsor her education. Instead, she has to look for money to help her sick mother.

In the kitchen at the house where Delphine lives in Yaounde, food is being prepared for 32 people. Emmanuel Nembo, a 52-year old government worker originally from Lebialem, says that a year ago, he had only five mouths to feed.

The number exploded as people from the southwest fled their villages and pleaded for him to feed and shelter them.

Emmanuel says he is praying for the crisis to stop because many have been coming and he can no longer offer help.

“We are stretching an olive hand of peace. Those in the bush should give a chance. Come back home, to their homes so that they could meet their mothers, brothers and sisters,” he says.

Many schools have been closed in the northwest and southwest areas since November 2016, when lawyers and teachers began a strike to stop what they see as the overbearing use of French.

Separatists took over the movement, and began pushing for the regions to become independent.

Since then, several dozen schools have been torched, and armed men have kidnapped or killed a number of teachers. Many students in the regions can no longer attend the few schools that are still open, for fear of the unknown.

The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people, a majority of them children of school age, have fled the violence in the English-speaking regions for safer locations. Tens of thousands have crossed over to Nigeria, and no one knows when any of them will ever return to school.

Source: VOA

Tensions between English-speaking Cameroonians and the West-central African nation’s French-speaking government stretches back to end of colonial rule nearly 60 years ago. At the heart of the tension is Anglophones’ desire to form their own independent state, Ambazonia. In recent weeks there have been violent clashes and several protesters have been killed, reportedly by government security forces. The Conversation Africa asked Verkijika G. Fanso to explain what’s happening.

The animosity is actually between English-speaking Cameroonians and the government led and dominated by French-speaking Cameroonians. They have ruled the country in an authoritarian way since the unification of the two former United Nations trusteeship territories – French Cameroun and British Southern Cameroons – in 1961.

The current dispute is between the part of the country that was once run by the British, and the larger part where French is spoken and which was once run by the French. In 1972 the original federal structure that post-colonial unification was based on was abrogated. The English-speaking, or Anglophone, West Cameroon was annexed in a united republic, and in 1984 the word “united” was scrapped. The country became Cameroon and the English-speaking region was assimilated into the French-speaking area.

The dignity and statehood of Anglophones was silently destroyed – not by the French-speaking (Francophone) community at large, but by the government led and dominated by Francophones.

Being Anglophone or Francophone in Cameroon is not just the ability to speak, read and use English or French as a working language. It is about being exposed to the Anglophone or Francophone ways including things like outlook, culture and how local governments are run.

Anglophones have long complained that their language and culture are marginalised. They feel their judicial, educational and local government systems should be protected. They want an end to annexation and assimilation and more respect from the government for their language and political philosophies. And if that doesn’t happen, they want a total separation and their own independent state.

What’s the history of the call for an independent state?

On January 1 1960 French Cameroun gained independence and became Cameroun Republic. Later that year Nigeria gained its independence from Britain and became a Federal Republic. The British-controlled southern Cameroons was then separated from Nigeria and was due to achieve full independence on October 1 1961.

But there was a hitch: the United Nations organised a plebiscite in which southern Cameroonians were asked to chose between joining the Cameroun Republic or Nigeria. This vote was prompted by a British report that insisted its former territory would not survive economically on its own.

Southern Cameroonians wanted nothing more to do with Nigeria. They had suffered enormously at the hands of Igbo people who’d settled in their territory in previous decades. So they elected to unite in a new federation with Cameroun Republic. It was supposed to be a partnership of equals, a notion reinforced by bilateral negotiations that had started before the vote.

These negotiations were concluded at the Foumban Conference in July 1961. The general view after the conference was that the delegation from the Cameroun Republic, accompanied by French advisers, got virtually everything they wanted. The Anglophones, who received none of the support promised by the British or the UN, were effectively sidelined.

So the new federation was born, but it was never a happy union. The regions were centrally governed but neither of the two presidents since unification have spoken nor understood English. The incumbent, Paul Biya, reads English with difficulty.

Since then Anglophones have pushed for autonomy. This call is actually supported in a UN resolution passed in April 1961 that defines the joining of the two former territories as a federation of two states, equal in status and autonomous.

What’s prompted the latest violence?

In October 2016 lawyers went on a strike in an effort to force the government to stop appointing Francophone magistrates who spoke no English and had no training in common law to preside over courts in the Anglophone regions.

During peaceful demonstrations in the cities of Bamenda and Buea, the lawyers were roughly manhandled by government security forces.

Teachers soon came out in support of the lawyers. They wanted the government to stop posting Francophone teachers who spoke no English to teach subjects other than French in Anglophone schools. People across professions followed the teachers, and Cameroon’s cities became “ghost towns” everywhere on certain days of the week as part of a large-scale stay away.

Earlier this year government banned the trade unions that had led the strikes. Many of their members – some of whom were engaged in discussions with the government – were arrested and jailed on charges of terrorism and attempts to change the form of the state. The government also shut down internet and other communication services in Anglophone regions to stop people sharing information and organising.*

Shamed by international condemnation, President Biya reinstated communication services three months later. He also ordered the release of some strike leaders and scrapped the charges against them. But he didn’t call for a resumption of talks.

Anglophones were unimpressed. On October 1 they took to the streets to commemorate what they consider their independence day. They raised the flag of Ambazonia in various towns and cities. It was an assertion of autonomy. Government security forces were deployed and used excessive. Over the next few days a number of people were killed, some reports suggesting 17 others suggesting as many as 100.

Is there any chance of resolving this conflict?

Dialogue and diplomacy are foremost. Cameroon’s leadership must initiate or reinstate dialogue with those representing Anglophone interests. Failing this, the African Union or the UN – or both – should initiate dialogue.

Cameroon is being haunted by agreements that were never respected, from the Foumban Conference to the UN’s resolution regarding autonomy. These agreements must be revisited and respected if the crisis is to end.

Culled from The Conversation

MTN Cameroon has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ministry of Secondary Education (MINESEC) for the use of its mobile money system for the payment of school fees and related charges in Cameroonian secondary schools.

Parents will no longer have to move and spend hours in queues to pay their children’s school fees, but will be able to pay remotely through their mobile phone, at any time and from any location.

This will enhance transparency and traceability in the collection of fees by secondary schools. This will enable the Ministry of Secondary Education to improve the quality of services provided to the Educative Community.

Source: Telecompaper

One of the things imperial Cameroon brandishes to the world as a success is its bilingualism. No one seems to see that Cameroon bilingualism is an act of fraud; that it disrespects the Anglophone component of the imposed nation; that it is an arch example of colonization and assimilation; that nowhere else in the whole wide world is this form of bilingualism practiced. Today, we lift the veil, so that the fraud may be exposed.

2. What is bilingualism? Bilingualism is a situation in which the administration of a country uses two languages to serve two groups of its users, each of which uses only one of the two languages in question. A country adopts bilingualism only when it has two groups of its population, each of which understands or is presumed to understand only one of the two languages in question, and not both. In that situation, the government makes it its responsibility to serve every user in one of the two languages of the country.

3. Bilingualism exists to honour and respect the identity of each of the linguistic groups of users; it recognizes the language of each of the groups as part of its identity and therefore will never impose upon each of the groups the language of the other group. Whether you take the example of Canada or of Switzerland, this is what you will find. In Canada for example, the official language in Quebec is French, not the English of the majority. It is only in imperial Cameroon that English is not the official language of the English speaking peoples! Nowhere else in the world is this form of fraud practised.

4. In Cameroon, bilingualism has taken the form of the imposition of French on the English speaking peoples of the Southern Cameroons; the refusal to recognize their own language, English, as the official language in the Southern Cameroons; the absence of any law which makes texts issued only in French illegal in the Southern Cameroons and therefore virtually no responsibility for the government even to translate official texts. No citizen can sue the government for issuing a text only in one language or reject a document served to him in French. Translation by government is done on an optional basis. They say that English is also used in La Republique du Cameroun, but this is a mere hoax since no English administrator dares serve anyone there a text in English. On the contrary, French is the language in which most administrative texts are served to Southern Cameroonians within the Southern Cameroons; French is the official language in the military and polices forces and virtually all professional schools; everywhere in the Southern Cameroons you find government sign boards in French, but you cannot see one single government sign board in English in Republique du Cameroun.

5. The absolute and primary condition for the existence of bilingualism (or the use of two languages in the administration of a country) is that each linguistic group should keep its own language as its official language and not be imposed the language of the other group. Once the two groups are forced to learn each other’s language, the administration is bound to become monolingual. It is the language of the minority group that will die, for the simple reason that the minority must first learn the language of the majority and thus establish communication in that language!

6. For bilingualism to exist in Cameroon (and not the assimilation that is now called bilingualism), English must become the official language in the Southern Cameroons and French to be the official language in
La Republique du Cameroun. This would dramatically increase the need for bilingual services, because all French documents must be translated into the official language in the Southern Cameroons and all English documents be translated into the official language in La Republique du Cameroun. Interpretation services will also increase because all conferences must be interpreted.

7. It is the monolingualism of individuals which forces the administration to be bilingual. That is to say, for the administration to be bilingual, those who use that administration must be monolingual or at least have the choice of using only their own language! Bilingualism of individuals must necessarily end the bilingualism of the administration or the state! If all or most citizens are bilingual, what need would there be for the government to translate any texts? In Cameroon, bilingualism was introduced only because there are Anglophones who don’t understand French. If Anglophones who don’t understand French continue to diminish in number every year, the need for bilingualism must also decrease! Translation of government texts is done only for this group! As you can see, it is only a matter of time before the generation of Southern Cameroonians who don’t understand French is phased out. When that happens, all Southern Cameroonians will be speaking French. At that point, it would be completely useless to use English in the Cameroon administration.

8. Language is simply a tool for communication. Once communication is established, there is no need for another language! The more so-called Anglophones learn French, the more communication is established in French, and the less need there is to use English any more, especially in the administration. Always remember that English was introduced into the colonial Cameroon administration only for the colonized Anglophones who could not yet speak French! It was not introduced so that Francophones should learn English! No, it was a measure to accommodate their colonized Anglophones while their assimilation is completed. Consequently, once communication is established through French, English must naturally cease to be valid as a means of communication in the administration.

9. If I can speak your language, what would be the need for you to learn my own? Even if you can learn my own, what purpose would it serve since we are already able to communicate in your own language?

10. In the current imperial Cameroon situation, translation and interpretation services must naturally dwindle and finally die. It is an impossibility to continue to translate texts and interpret conferences for those who already understand the original language in which the texts were written or conferences held! It would not be long before everyone would discover the enormous waste of time and resources, and also the hypocrisy involved.

11. When Southern Cameroonians meet people from La Republique du Cameroun, what language do they speak? French, of course! Why? Because Anglophones are the first to learn French and so communication must occur only in the language which both sides understand.

12. If most or all Southern Cameroonians begin to speak or even merely understand French, what would be the need to use English in the Cameroon administration? And if Anglophones continue to speak in French, who will speak their own language? Does this not tell you that English is programmed to die in the Cameroon administration?

13. Yes, only the language that is used in the administration counts as an official language or as part of the bilingualism. A sizeable portion of English people speak French; that does not make England a bilingual
nation. Similarly, a sizeable portion of Germans speak English, that does not make English one of the official languages of Germany. Many French people speak English, that does not make English an official language in France. An official language of a nation is only a language that is used in the administration or in public offices.

14. As further proof, let me ask you this question: In 1961 or even 1972 what percentage of Southern Cameroonians understood French? What is the percentage today? Probably in 1961 and later on in 1972, less than 20% of Southern Cameroonians understood French. Today, probably 70%! Does that percentage that understands French today need any translation or interpretation? If the need for translation and interpretation is constantly dwindling, what does that tell you about the future of bilingual services in colonial Cameroon?

15. The questions above prove to you that Cameroon is moving towards a single language, not bilingualism. Colonial Cameroon is therefore guilty of fraud, misrepresentation, swindle and cheating. Its version of bilingualism is an act of fraud against the people of the Southern Cameroons; it is part of its colonial and assimilation policy, not bilingualism at all.

16. The only way for bilingualism to survive is for English to be the official language in the southern Cameroons and French to be the official language in La Republique du Cameroun. That is what will promote bilingual services such as translation and interpretation.

17. Southern Cameroonians, you now see the gigantic fraud, the misrepresentation, the hoax, the swindle that is practiced on you by colonial Cameroon! Wake up and claim the right to your own language. No more should French be accepted as the official language in the Southern Cameroons; no more should French sign boards be accepted; no more should administrative texts be served in French in the Southern Cameroons.

18. Francophones learn English today, not so that it can be used in the Cameroon administration, but for the enormous advantages that English gives them in the world. Do not be deceived. Even Francophone Ministers who study in English countries use only the French language when serving in the Cameroon administration. The Anglophone Prime Minister uses only French and so do all other Anglophones in the administration. They must do this, to prove to their Francophone bosses that they have been thoroughly assimilated; to pretend to belong, to gain favours and so on. No one dares point out the programmed end of bilingualism in Cameroon.

19. There you have your so-called bilingualism, one more crime against the people of the Southern Cameroons

By Denis Atabong