US President Donald Trump has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, announcing he will replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, White House officials said Tuesday.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Trump praised both Pompeo and Gina Haspel the deputy director at the CIA  who will succeed Pompeo at the CIA, becoming the first woman to run the spy agency, if confirmed.

“I am proud to nominate the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, to be our new Secretary of State,” Trump said.

“Mike graduated first in his class at West Point, served with distinction in the US Army, and graduated with Honors from Harvard Law School. He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives with a proven record of working across the aisle.”

“Gina Haspel, the Deputy Director of the CIA, will be nominated to replace Director Pompeo and she will be the CIA’s first-ever female director, a historic milestone. Mike and Gina have worked together for more than a year, and have developed a great mutual respect,” the president continued.

Source: Presstv

Governor of Cameroon’s North West region has in a press statement issued a renewal of the curfew imposed in the region.

The decision to impose a curfew months back was to contain guerilla style attacks by separatist elements on members of the security force.

A March 12 statement from the governor’s office said the regional order restricted movement of persons and property as from (Sunday) the 11th of March 2018 from 09 PM to 5 AM within the region.

The previous order a week long one was imposed between March 4 and March 11, 2018. The South West region have imposed much lengthier curfew duration – opting for a month.

The two regions are at the heart of the Anglophone crisis, where English-minority population are seeking to break off from the French-majority Cameroon. Separatists elements operating under the so-called Ambazonia defense force have killed over twenty-four soldiers.

They have kidnapped one soldier and another government official in a new leg of their operations. One of the kidnapped persons, a delegate for Social Affairs in the NorthWest appeared in a recent video begging the government to intervene in securing his release.

Meanwhile, the United Nation’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, reports that the number of Cameroonians fleeing the Anglophone crisis into Nigeria has crossed the 20,000 mark.

A UNHCR report dated March 8 said a total of 20,291 people had officially been registered and were now living in Nigeria’s Benue and Cross River States. They comprised people living in nine communities.

The UN body said it needed 18 million dollars to better cater for the refugees – a request it said was based on the contingency plan. As many as 6,800 plus refugees are in Obanliku, Boki (4,664), Kwande (3,501), Akampka (2,197), Etung (1,934) etc

Source: Africa New

A US Army News Service article points to a dilemma faced by soldiers in northern Cameroon, who are stationed there to aid Cameroon’s fight against the militant group Boko Haram. The American soldiers are carrying out a diplomatic role that is not normally within their purview. “With no State Department personnel stationed in the area, soldiers are often placed into a warrior-diplomat role, representing the American government wherever they go.” But even AFRICOM seems worried by the mission creep that inevitably takes place when a solider becomes a “warrior-diplomat.” Posted by AFRICOM to its official website, the article notes that “any misconduct by a soldier could spark controversy and put the nascent relationship between both countries in jeopardy.”

In Cameroon, American Special Forces work closely with the Brigade d’intervention rapide, an elite, Israeli-trained unit that fights Boko Haram. Last year, Amnesty International found that on a small base in Salak, near the border of Nigeria that the American soldiers shared with the B.I.R., at least sixty people “were subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.” Some of the B.I.R. soldiers have now been deployed to put down an uprising in Cameroon’s Anglophone region on the border with Nigeria. Reports of human rights abuses in the area are rife, and the Internet has been shut down there for the past year.

Yet, little seems to weaken AFRICOM’s vision of its work as inherently good. “Within US policy circles, or within US training and assistance community, or within the Special Operations community, there are these beliefs in cardinal truths, that US training and engagement makes these units more professional, that we ‘have to do something’ to help them fight terrorism,” said Page, the Chatham House researcher. “This failure to appreciate the consequences of these day-to-day things that we’re doing and what long-term implications they may have… characterizes US foreign policy in the Sahel.”

There is little hope that the US will stop putting heavy emphasis on military solutions in Africa, or, for that matter, elsewhere in the world. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had no prior experience in diplomacy, is essentially charged with taking apart his own agency. State’s budget has been slashed, and Tillerson has overseen the exit of an entire echelon of senior diplomats from the department. In the meantime, Secretary of Defense James Mattis has secured ever more resources for the Defense Department.

Trump’s choice for Senior Africa Director on the National Security Council is Cyril Sartor, who was the Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Africa. There has not been a permanent Secretary of State for African Affairs since January 2017, but in December, the Defense Department named Alan Patterson its new Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. Patterson is another CIA alum, who was previously in charge of clandestine operations in Africa. That former CIA officers occupy two of three leading positions for US engagement in Africa is dismaying. In earlier decades, the CIA was implicated in the assassination of Congo’s independence leader Patrice Lumumba, the coup d’état that overthrew Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the arrest by the apartheid South African government of Nelson Mandela. More recently, in 2011 the CIA armed rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. The agency’s history of disruptive actions is not a promising backdrop to the general contours of American strategy today on a continent of countries that the US president has labeled “shithole.”

The gap left by the US’s (and, to some extent, Europe’s) lack of economic and political engagement with Africa has led the continent to turn its attention elsewhere for trade and investment. “Essentially, the entire non-military agenda in Africa of Africa’s outside partners has been ceded to China,” said Columbia professor Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent, a study of Chinese involvement in Africa. The lack of engagement is to the detriment of both Africa and the US, he argued.

Source: www,nybooks.com

Cho Ayaba, AGC leader was quick to spin the news. First, he denied knowledge of his own meeting, and then shifted responsibility, blaming the Interim Government for the arrests at the meeting. But the meeting in question that saw the abduction of eight Southern Cameroons refugees in Calabar was actually organized by Dr. Ayaba.

Cameroon Intelligence Report has confirmed that Cho Ayaba used a third party who was among the arrested, to plan the meeting. The so-called Ambazonian freedom fighter was to address the meeting through a conference call. The meeting was meant to persuade attendees, most of whom were his acolytes, not to attend or participate in the joint self-defense initiative that was being organized by the Interim Government.

The event, aimed at gathering as many self-defense proponents to the Calabar meeting as possible. Ayaba was going to sway them from participating in any IG joint self defense initiative. At the end of his address, Ayaba’s (lady) representative who has lived in Calabar for years runs a hotel business and trades in petrol had solely put the meeting together on Ayaba’s behalf, would distribute as support from the AGC, cash from Dr. Ayaba. It was a stipend they would use to pay their transportation back to Ikom.

But the plan wasn’t going very well. The refugees smelled danger with increasing pressure from the lady as the day of the meeting drew closer, coupled with the fact that she won’t reveal to anyone, the venue of the meeting in Calabar. Some officials of nonprofit groups in the camp heard of the meeting and the secrecy involved and passed out announcement in the camp warning refugees not to attend the meeting. We also gathered that some camp officials of the IG passed out an alarm owing to the very secrecy under which the meeting was being organized.

This lady, one Emerald Johnson, it should be recalled, had hosted Dr. Ayaba in her motel while he visited Dadi on November 2017, to tour the camp his ADF boys were being trained. She didn’t only host Ayaba, she accompanied Ayaba, sitting in the back seat in the car with him to Dadi. It wasn’t a coincidence that Ayaba chose her and her hotel facilities to host the meeting in Calabar that saw the arrest of innocent needy refugees who had gone there hoping they did get some money after Ayaba addresses them.

Unfortunately for those who ignored the warnings and went to the meeting, they were picked up right at their hotel locations before the meeting even started. News began to filter out immediately after the arrest from the police station in Calabar as one of them had succeeded to sneak his phone into the cell. From behind bars, he began sending text messages to others who had stayed back in Ikom. He said what happened in Abuja has happened to them, that they have all been abducted.

When things took the wrong turn, Cho Ayaba spun the news, denying knowledge and responsibility for the meeting entirely. First, he accused the IG of calling the meeting, actually naming Acting President, Dr. Sako and Homeland Security Secretary, John Egywang as the ones who called for the meeting. He said that the Acting President set up the meeting purposefully to get his supporters abducted like in the Abuja case. To some other people, he said that the IG had called for the meeting to persuade his ADF members to defect him and join the joint initiative that was being put together by the IG for self-defense.

When contacted, both the Acting President and Homeland security chief denied ever knowing about the meeting. The IG self-defense meeting was to come up on the weekend of Saturday March 10. But before the meeting, Ayaba and his surrogates let the cart, accepting he actually called the meeting before going viral with attacks on Chris Anu, Secretary of State for Communications for revealing the identity of Emerald Johnson, the lady who hosted the meeting. Ayaba and his gang have said that by revealing the name of the lady, Anu put the lives and security of refugees at stake.

Cameroon Intelligence Report talked to Anu, hitherto, Editor of the Southern Cameroons Journal, asking him why he put the name of the lady out knowing that she was a Southern Cameroonian and he stated; “I had no clue who the lady was, not until news came to me afterward that the same lady was the one who accompanied Cho Ayaba to Dadi,” he said.

Anu pointed out that; “I received a WhatsApp post from Alex Mbianda in Boston that said Atam Milan had conspired to get some woman in Ikom to collect names of refugees 11 years and above and send to him.” Anu said “the post came across as legit, and I was like, this concerns refugees. If I do nothing and something happens, people may blame me for not following up on Mbianda’s lead.” He said he called a number of people in the refugee camp, including George Tando who was accompanying the two women from London and Germany to find out what precisely their assignment was. He said he called about four different workers in the camp to find out who was it Milan was conspiring with to illegally sneak refugees to South Africa. He said he was given two phone numbers of a woman who was supposed to be that of Milan’s accomplice, all belonging to the Johnson lady.

“When I called her,” Anu said, “I told her my name is Ashu Martin. You see, in my head, I was like if I should say I’m Chris Anu, and she has anything conspiratorial, she won’t want to talk to me. So I gave her a different name to get her open up and talk to me. But she began immediately yelling at her lungs saying that people should stop calling her, that she knows nothing about the Southern Cameroons crisis other than what she sees on Facebook. She even threatened to sue, saying that since morning, so many people have been calling her number and that she didn’t know why. And then she dropped the call.” Anu explained.

Anu said that since nobody was, initially, – not the IG, nor any other group was accepting responsibility for the meeting that the lady had put together, his immediate conclusion was that Emerald Johnson must have been an agent of the Nigerian Gov’t used to set-up the arrest of the eight refugees. “Remember, she had told me earlier in the phone call that she’s Nigerian, and that she knows nothing about the Southern Cameroons crisis. So later on, when news of the arrests came out and it happened that she was the one who organized it, and coupled with the fact that neither Ayaba nor the IG would take responsibility, I took her for an agent, thinking the meeting was solely her making. In my heart, I was like if she actually plotted the arrest, then she should be exposed, people should know. I had no idea, not until I mentioned the name publicly, that the AGC now claimed that Emerald Johnson was their supporter and a close friend of Dr. Cho Ayaba whom he had used to convene the meeting.

“I was taken aback by AGC attacks on me. I thought by revealing the name of the woman, I was indeed helping our people know who the agent behind their arrests was.” Anu stated. “Of course, if I had known that comrade Ayaba organized the meeting, or let me put it this way; If Ayaba had blown an alarm that he put a meeting together and his supporters got abducted; or think about it this way, if the lady had told me earlier in the phone call that she was Cameroonian and then later on I come to find out that she was at the Centre of the arrests, I probably would have treated the story in a different way. But here was I thinking we have a repeat of the Nera Hotel incident and the agent must be exposed” Anu explained. “I called the lady just once. And the call was only following up with Mbianda’s lead that some woman was about taking names of refugees to forward to Milan.

“Now, they are out there blaming me for blowing the cover of a lady they all knew supposed to, maybe have been protected instead of blaming themselves for initially trying to shift responsibility for the meeting, that isn’t leadership, Anu concluded.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with files from Kingsley Betek in Calabar