Ethiopia has appointed a woman to the largely ceremonial position of president for the first time, further increasing female representation in the government of Africa’s second most populous nation.

In a unanimous vote on Thursday, Ethiopian lawmakers picked career diplomat Sahle-Work Zewde, 68, to replace Mulatu Teshome, who resigned in unclear circumstances.

Ethiopia’s reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed last week appointed a slimline 20-person cabinet in which half the posts are held by women.

They include defense minister Aisha Mohammed and Muferiat Kamil who leads the newly-created Ministry of Peace, responsible for police and domestic intelligence agencies.

“If the current change in Ethiopia is headed equally by both men and women, it can sustain its momentum and realize a prosperous Ethiopia free of religious, ethnic and gender discrimination,” Sahle-Work said Thursday.

Sahle-Work, who was born in the capital Addis Ababa and attended university in France, has been Ethiopia’s ambassador to France, Djibouti, Senegal and the regional bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

Just prior to her appointment as president, she was the UN’s top official at the African Union. She is fluent in English and French as well as Amharic, Ethiopia’s main language.

As president, she is expected to serve two six-year terms.

The European Union hailed Sahle-Work as “a highly accomplished diplomat,” calling her appointment “another sign of Ethiopia’s path towards reform and internal cohesion,” the spokesperson for the EU’s external action service said in a statement.

“Mulatu has shown us the way for change and hope; he has shown life continues before and after leaving power. I call on others to heed his example and be ready for change,” said Sahle-Work in a speech to parliament.

Political power in Ethiopia is wielded by the prime minister, with the president’s role restricted to attending ceremonies and functions.

Nevertheless, Sahle-Work’s position carries important symbolic weight and social influence.

“Government and opposition parties have to understand we are living in a common house and focus on things that unite us, not what divides us, to create a country and generation that will make all of us proud,” she said.

“The absence of peace victimizes firstly women, so during my tenure I will emphasize women’s roles in ensuring peace and the dividends of peace for women,” she added.

Sahle-Work becomes Africa’s only serving female head of state, albeit in a ceremonial role.

A handful of African countries have in the recent past been led by female presidents with executive powers, including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia (2006-18) and Joyce Banda in Malawi (2012-14).

(Source: AFP)

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On 5 January this year, Nigerian security operatives abducted 12 men from a hotel in Abuja, the federal capital. All were members of the self-styled government of the Republic of Ambazonia, Africa’s latest secessionist movement in neighbouring Cameroon, and all were refugees in Nigeria, some of long standing, among them Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, the would-be president of the aspiring Ambazonia: population, were it ever to happen, roughly five million. At first the Nigerian press made much of the abductions but for the past eight months it has remained silent. A senior executive on a leading Nigerian daily paper told me he wasn’t wary of covering the story: it simply hadn’t occurred to him to do so.

Overshadowing the secession is the inevitable question: are African states that owe their boundaries to the colonial era still viable as the entities that European imperialism created? The idea that maps in Africa can be redrawn has been deplored by African heads of state, the African Union and its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity. The old colonial boundaries, however unsatisfactory, should remain as they are, it’s argued. Reconfiguring modern states along the lines of the pre-colonial arrangements between religious groups and nations (or ‘tribes’, as we were known) would be still more chaotic. The disastrous creation of South Sudan in 2011 seems to prove the case. Resources are also a factor: the putative new state of Ambazonia would have the benefit of almost all of the oil and gas reserves lying off the Cameroonian coast, as well as valuable timber forests inland.

The emergence of a secessionist movement in Cameroon reminds me, a Nigerian, that the continent’s boundary problems have more to do with limits to government in vast territories than with border disputes over contested land. As it happens, Cameroon and Nigeria have had a long and costly border dispute, but much more significant now is the fact that they have both joined the list of African states – which includes Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Sudan and Somalia – in which the sway of regimes falls well short of their peripheries. Boko Haram took advantage of this situation in Nigeria and compounded it; in Cameroon the wish for an independent English-speaking Ambazonia took root far from the Francophone capital, Yaoundé, after years of neglect by central government, punctuated by intermittent campaigns of repression.

The conflict pits marginalised English-speaking Cameroonians whose parents lived under British rule against a Francophone regime that looks after a population of roughly twenty million whose official language is French, even if many don’t speak it. The conflict is escalating rapidly, with several ‘Ambazonian’ secessionist insurgencies and tens of thousands of displaced people, many seeking refuge in Nigeria. If Africa’s leaders have anything to do with it, Ambazonia – named after the English Baptist Missionary Society’s colony for freed slaves in Ambas Bay – will never see the light of day. To them it would be an ominous signal that the sovereign boundaries of states in West and Central Africa were up for negotiation. Nigeria’s ruling elite, whose predecessors lived through a failed Igbo secession in the 1960s and a terrible civil war, have no enthusiasm for an independence movement on their doorstep. The kidnappings in January couldn’t have made that more clear. But neutralising the ‘Ambazonian government in exile’ won’t put an end to the turbulence in Cameroon.

I looked on with concern from Lagos as the authorities in Abuja refused to confirm or deny the kidnappings, or to tell us which of our many security forces were responsible. It took nearly three weeks for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to be allowed to see the prisoners. The Commission had earlier warned the government that forcibly returning them to Cameroon would violate ‘international refugee law’. Two days later, they were put on a plane to Cameroon. Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, wanted to be sure that Nigeria’s ‘territory is not used as a staging area to destabilise another friendly sovereign country’. The Cameroonian authorities were instructed to go easy on the detainees. Across the border, the Cameroonian minister of communications denounced them as ‘terrorists’ and made it clear that they would have to ‘face Cameroonian justice for their crimes’. The courts can impose the death penalty under the 2014 anti-terrorism law.

Not much love is lost between Nigerians and Cameroonians. At the height of the Boko Haram threat, between 2009 and 2015, Nigerians who fled across the border were ill-treated by Cameroonian security forces. There’s also a simmering grievance over Bakassi, a network of low-lying islands in an oil-rich peninsula about 500 km off our common coastline. The archipelago was originally considered part of Nigeria but, from 1981, Cameroon regularly invaded its fishing communities to extort ‘tax’, killing many Nigerian citizens in the process. The dispute was finally settled in Cameroon’s favour in 2002 at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The court’s ruling was based on agreements signed between the European powers in their scramble for African real estate from 1884 onwards, although this wasn’t the way the inhabitants – between 150,000 and 300,000 people – saw it. Before the European invasion, the area had been under the suzerainty of the obong or king of Calabar, nowadays part of Cross River State in southern Nigeria, and so Bakassians were surprised to discover that they were ‘Cameroonian’.

With the exception of Ethiopia, all African states are plagued by the colonial legacy, but the difficulties of Cameroon are among the most byzantine. It began life as a German colony. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, it was partitioned between France and Britain. Britain’s mandate consisted of two thin slivers along the western border with Nigeria, the ‘Northern Cameroons’ and the ‘Southern Cameroons’ – roughly 20 per cent of the territory. In due course the British would administer it from Nigeria. France took trusteeship of the lion’s share, with borders adjoining five of its other possessions. The French ran their League of Nations mandate in much the same way as they ran their imperial acquisitions, and when the stirrings of independence were felt after the Second World War, Paris took the view that postcolonial Africa should resemble colonial Africa as closely as possible. Cameroon’s destiny would be tied to the metropole as part of the ‘Communauté française’ in Africa. It would subscribe to a common currency whose value was pegged to the French franc (business as usual), and sign secretive military pacts in case French hegemony was called into question. This would be the template for 14 other French possessions in Africa. But in 1958 Ahmed Sékou Touré, the rising anticolonial star in Guinea, advocated outright independence with no binding ties to France (‘we have one prime and essential need: our dignity’). De Gaulle warned Guineans that a strike of this kind against French influence would be a Pyrrhic victory and when Sékou Touré’s cause prevailed, France was as good as its word. On the eve of independence, as an estimated three thousand French nationals prepared to leave, the administrative files were trashed, the phone lines and other communication links cut and the power sockets ripped out of the walls. Independent Guinea had to start from scratch.

A well-organised independence movement already existed in French Cameroon. Its leader, Ruben Um Nyobé, shared Sékou Touré’s view that a postcolonial future dominated by Paris would be no better than colonialism itself. ‘La colonisation,’ Um Nyobé argued, ‘c’est l’esclavage.’ The inhabitants of the British Cameroons looked on as Um Nyobé’s movement gained ground among their Francophone neighbours. Um Nyobé, born in 1913, is sometimes called the ‘forgotten founding father’ of the modern Republic of Cameroon. In 1948, he became secretary general of the Union des Populations du Cameroun. In 1952 and again in 1954, he spelled out the UPC’s goals at the UN: ‘1. The suppression of the boundaries created in 1916 between the two Cameroons; 2. abandonment by France of the policy of assimilation; 3. fixing of a time limit for trusteeship, after which Cameroon would achieve independence.’ In 1955, when the UPC embellished its demands in a Common Proclamation, the French authorities interpreted it as a unilateral declaration of independence by communists and bore down on the leadership. Um Nyobé and his colleagues retrenched and formed an armed wing, the Kamerunian National Liberation Army (he was now called ‘the black Ho Chi Minh’). A veteran of Indochina was drafted in to restore order.

Um Nyobé was captured and killed by a French reconnaissance team in 1958. It is said that his body was tied to a vehicle, dragged to his village and put on display. Photographs of Um Nyobé were destroyed, along with his writings and audio recordings of his speeches; his family, friends and sympathisers were persecuted; people were forbidden to mention his name. With the rebellion apparently subdued, it was time to end France’s trusteeship and reward the ‘moderates’. Cameroon gained its French-style independence, with many strings attached, on 1 January 1960. As Pierre Messmer, the former French high commissioner, explained, independence was given ‘to those who claimed the least’, after the elimination, ‘politically and militarily, of those who demanded it with the most intransigence’. Ahmadou Ahidjo, the first president, was an altogether more conciliatory figure than Um Nyobé. ‘The past is what it is,’ Ahidjo proclaimed. France was the future, and ‘we are for our part determined to look towards the future … Let’s refrain from throwing an armful of wood into a fire which is about to go out … We have forgotten.’

Um Nyobé’s followers still controlled most of the country, and De Gaulle despatched three hundred French officers and five battalions of mostly African troops, some of whom had seen action in the ongoing war in Algeria, to bolster Ahidjo and guarantee the country’s independence on French terms. Cameroon now became a dark sequel to the war in Indochina with an under-reported version of the Algerian conflict raging in the north: aerial bombardment, villagisation (compulsory resettlement), new pro-French militias; harsh interrogations, disappeared prisoners, public executions; and the hounding of exile enemies, one of whom – Félix Moumié, a follower of Um Nyobé – was poisoned in Geneva by the French secret services. The French general in charge of the operations estimated that in 1960 alone there were more than 21,000 dead. Almost nothing of what was going on reached the outside world. Journalists were mollycoddled by their French hosts, who took them on aerial reconnaissance trips to observe burning villages, a result, they were assured, of long-standing ‘tribal wars’ between the myriad ethnicities – about 250 – that make Cameroon a ‘mini-Africa’.

The insurgency dragged on until 1971 when the last of the leaders, Ernest Ouandié, was publicly executed. It seems that Ouandié had been on the run for days, hiding in banana plantations and under bridges. Exhausted and disoriented, he asked a passerby for help. The man recognised him and led him towards a nearby gendarmerie. The final picture taken of Ouandié shows him smiling on the way to the execution ground, where he refused the blindfold. The following year, a book by the Cameroonian novelist Mongo Beti, Main basse sur le Cameroun, which detailed what became known as ‘the hidden war’, was banned in France. In 2015 François Hollande acknowledged the repression that had followed independence and agreed to open the archives.

As violence raged among their Francophone neighbours, the UN decided that the fate of the British Cameroons should be settled by plebiscite: the inhabitants would say whether they wished to be part of the new Republic of Cameroon, or the new Nigeria. In early 1961, the Northern Cameroons opted to go with Nigeria and the Southern Cameroons voted to join the Republic of Cameroon under a two-state structure, each with its own parliament, courts and security forces, along with the right to elect the vice president. According to an American diplomat, the result ‘astounded the French Cameroonians’.

The Anglophones may have feared being ‘swamped’ by the Francophones, but they were also wary of the Igbo ethnic group across the border in the Eastern Region of Nigeria. This mistrust may well have swung the vote. Then, as now, the Igbos were more numerous than the entire population of Cameroon; then, as now, they were everywhere in Anglophone Cameroon. In the early 1950s, pro-independence groups from the Cameroons had briefly been allowed representation in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, in a kind of parliament of the colonised known as the Regional House of Assembly. The Cameroonian delegates were dismayed by the overbearing nature of Igbo political culture – many neighbouring minorities in Nigeria felt the same – and left after two years. One of their disagreements with the Igbos, ironically enough, was over the merits of secession. The British had ruled this out for their subjects in Cameroon, and so did the Igbo leader, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who later became Nigeria’s only non-executive president.

It didn’t take long for the Southern Cameroons to discover what they had voted for in the referendum. In 1966, Ahidjo outlawed all parties but his own; six years later, he called another referendum on whether or not to move from the federal arrangement to a unitary state. Given the numbers, a referendum could only favour the Francophones and the country was promptly renamed the United Republic of Cameroon. Francophone dominance was underscored in 1984, when Ahidjo’s successor, Paul Biya, dropped the word ‘United’ by decree (no need for a referendum). Ten years earlier, in a hugely symbolic gesture, Ahidjo had removed one of the two stars on the national flag. The following year, a distinguished Anglophone lawyer, Fon Gorji-Dinka, called for the former Southern Cameroons to secede, as a separate ‘Republic of Ambazonia’. He argued that the unification agreement had never been ratified by the Anglophone parliament: the Southern Cameroons were still a UN trust territory, a view recently endorsed by a former US under-secretary of state for African affairs, Herman Cohen, who used the controversial status of Bakassi to bolster his argument: the 1961 plebiscite ‘would certainly have been invalidated’ by the International Court of Justice, had it been consulted at the time, for the simple reason that Bakassi should have taken part in the vote but could not, because it was then part of Nigeria. You begin to see my point about the complexities which colonialism left us to sort out.

As Biya consolidated his power, demands to ‘restore the stolen independence of the British Southern Cameroons by La République du Cameroun’ were met with lengthy prison sentences. Anglophones were excluded from all senior appointments, even in their own territory, where most of the administrators were and are Francophones. The latest – and most serious – call for secession was spearheaded by the two institutions most affected: courts and schools. The trigger was the appointment in early 2016 of judges with no English and no knowledge of common law. Lawyers went on strike demanding they be removed. A few months later, teachers came out against the appointment of French-language staff who didn’t speak English, the government having earlier tweaked the General Certificate of Education to resemble the French Baccalauréat. University students and other activists quickly became involved and the security forces killed four protesters in December. The following month, an umbrella group, the Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium (CACSC), was banned and two of its leaders arrested. Tensions rose as courts and schools remained closed and the internet was shut down. CACSC called for a one-day-a-week strike, which was extended to three days in August.

With the approach of the new school year, the government released the protest leaders in the hope that the teachers would call off their strike. They continued, although not entirely by choice. Eight more protesters were reportedly killed in street demonstrations. Then, in October 2017, a united front of separatists came out with a unilateral declaration of independence. Mass demonstrations were met with force: Amnesty International reckoned at least 17 deaths. A group calling itself the Ambazonia Defence Force emerged from the bush and claimed responsibility for eight separate attacks against the security forces, which had killed ten. A second group, the Tigers of Ambazonia, claimed responsibility for further attacks. By the end of the year, 17 security personnel had been killed. The number of civilian deaths is unknown but generally put ‘in the dozens’. In his New Year speech, Biya – now in his mid-eighties – appointed several new Anglophone ministers to his cabinet, but that was all. By the end of January, with the Ambazonian government-in-exile detained by the Nigerian authorities, two more armed separatist groups announced themselves. Violence continued; the security forces burned down villages and drove people into the bush. Inexorably, the number of displaced people began to rise. By the time I travelled to the region a few months ago, the UN estimated that about 160,000 people had been displaced within Cameroon itself, and another 20,000 to 50,000 (nobody is sure) had fled to Nigeria.

I was headed for Buea (pronounced ‘Boya’), 280 km from the Nigerian border and once the capital of the short-lived Anglophone entity that federated with Cameroon after the plebiscite. What should have been a five-hour journey took eight because of the checkpoints along the way, mostly manned by Francophone soldiers, some of whom affected not to speak English. At each checkpoint, we got out and showed our IDs. Not having any ID is a criminal offence and a pretext for detaining young men suspected of being terrorists. I was singled out at every checkpoint because of my Nigerian passport, which attracted a non-negotiable fee each time. I tried refusing once and was told to stand in the sun until I became ‘humble’.

When I tried to return by the same route two weeks later, I was stopped by soldiers at the first town along the way and held for eight hours at their headquarters. So what did you say you had come to do? So who did you say you contacted while you were here? I spent the time between our Q&A sessions strolling around the military compound until I was told I would have to sleep there.

Back on the road, I discovered that there had been an offensive by the security forces a few days earlier. I should have guessed from the truckloads of soldiers I’d seen heading in that direction while I’d chatted with Anglophone ‘terrorists’ – lawyers, journalists, human rights activists – in the forecourt of my hotel in Buea. As we spoke, I began to see that in a perfect world they would like a secession, but the price – exacted by Biya’s soldiers, on the one hand and armed secessionists, on the other – is high. They were clinging by their fingertips to hopes of a peaceful resolution, with or without an ‘Ambazonia’. Biya’s crackdown on strikes in the schools and the courts had opened up the game for the armed factions. The teachers’ strike, for instance, was only meant to last a few days, but the armed groups decided to use it as leverage against Biya and ordered the indefinite closure of all schools. Those that reopened were attacked by the armed groups and at least three head teachers were abducted – two of them while I was in the country – although all were eventually released. One rebel grouping, the Ambazonia Freedom Fighters, even posted photos on Facebook of five clearly identifiable children at their desks and urged its online followers to ‘stone them’. If this is the social media profile of Ambazonia in the making, citizens will be queuing for their exit visas before the new flag is hoisted.

Anything between five and twenty secessionist groups now operate in the region. Some are undoubtedly criminal enterprises, but crime is common, too, in Biya’s army. The Ambazonia Defence Force, which is the largest with around two thousand bearing arms, has a code of conduct which states that ‘no fighter … shall engage in rape, extortion, theft of property, torture, or killing of innocent civilians.’ No doubt Biya’s army subscribes to the same principles. Emmanuel Freudenthal, a French journalist who spent a week embedded in an ADF camp, found that the fighters were mostly farmers ‘pushed out of their villages’ by the army. They’re equipped with primitive, single-shot hunting rifles made in Nigeria. Biya’s army is supplied by the French with modern assault rifles (firing roughly 600 rounds a minute). To the extent that the ADF have held their ground – ‘a surprising amount’, according to Freudenthal – it’s largely because ‘the state hasn’t developed roads or means of access to many of the areas.’ This lack of interest in building infrastructure is one of the causes of the uprising. Cho Ayaba, the ADF figurehead in what seems to be a classic top-down structure, left the country in 1998. He communicates with his followers via YouTube. In August he called for ‘outright war’. It was a response to an earlier announcement by Biya – the longest-serving African head of state after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodora Nguemo Mbasogo – that he would run for another seven-year term in October. Anyone found near a polling booth, the ADF warned, would be killed.

Buea was considered safe when I visited. By 7 October, when the country went to the polls, there were reports of gunfire. Only a handful of voters cast ballots in Buea itself, and one analyst put the turnout in the Anglophone region at just 5 per cent. An entire district didn’t vote at all because, according to a police spokesperson, ‘the area is dangerous’, despite the heavily armoured convoy that attempted to deliver ballot papers. Biya and his wife, Chantal, voted in Yaoundé surrounded by soldiers. Biya himself was satisfied that the ‘election campaign was conducted peacefully’. The next day, Maurice Kamto of the opposition Movement for the Rebirth of Cameroon claimed victory and invited Biya to ‘organise a peaceful way to transfer power’. The government, which had said it would ‘not tolerate any disorder before, during or after the presidential vote’, quickly warned that ‘only the Constitutional Council would be allowed to announce results’ and that any form of challenge to the verdict would ‘not be tolerated’.

Kamto’s possible victory points to problems within Francophone Cameroon itself. During my trip through the country I met many Francophones sympathetic to the Anglophone plight. In the port city of Douala, ordinary French-speakers had marched in solidarity with their Anglophone compatriots during the strikes, but this shouldn’t have been surprising. I’ve been using the word ‘Francophone’ as though it were an existential condition, and a sign of allegiance to the former colonial power, but this is really only the case for the elites that took over in the wake of colonialism. As in Nigeria (and elsewhere in Africa), the challenge is to wrest power from two generations of colonial appointees and to share the remains of ‘the fruits of independence’.

Increasingly this challenge is expressed in separatist terms, with old fissures reopening and new ones becoming visible. Events in Cameroon coincide with calls among the Igbos of south-east Nigeria to revisit the Biafran secession. As in Cameroon, the government’s response has been harsh. Muhammadu Buhari has promised to ‘kill more Igbos’ if there is ‘a repeat of the civil war’: in 2016 he sent in the military to disrupt a Biafra Remembrance Day rally, resulting in an estimated 150 deaths; during the operation, Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, the most vocal of these separatist groups, was abducted (whereabouts still unknown). Another group, the Biafra Nations Youth League, now has its headquarters in Bakassi peninsula, where it has teamed up with the Bakassi Movement for Self-Determination, whose interim head has declared a democratic republic.

For the inhabitants of Bakassi, nothing has changed since it switched hands. The Nigerian government barely acknowledged their existence in the old days, unless the Cameroonian authorities were on a tax-gathering spree, and today it has no jurisdiction in the territory. Bakassians who left for other parts of Nigeria at the time of the handover were promised resettlement, but 16 years later many are still living in camps. Those who remain in the peninsula – almost all Nigerians – are still subject to punitive taxes imposed by marauding Cameroonian gendarmes, most recently in early 2017 when almost one hundred were killed, as we learned from those who managed to escape, and who have now added to the growing refugee population as Cameroonians, too, continue fleeing into Nigeria. In practical terms the border means little.

About to head back to Nigeria, not knowing that Biya would shortly announce a date for the presidential election, I took advice from the staff at my hotel and went by sea. They escorted me to the waterfront, two hours’ drive from Buea, where I boarded a ‘flying boat’ – a large canoe with an outboard motor – in the company of a Nigerian and an English-speaking Cameroonian, smuggling forty bags of rice. Two and a half hours later, we eased into one of the creeks that used to provide cover for militants in the Niger Delta (here, too, the wish to secede from Nigeria is strong). Waiting for us were men on motorbikes to convey the contraband rice to the market in town. ‘At least you didn’t have to cope with immigration,’ one of my companions remarked as we shared a beer later. He was a university student who regularly made this run to help with his fees, although his chances of employment, with or without a degree, are slim.

The arbitrary colonial frontiers and the ineptitude of our postcolonial regimes, barely able to administer the lands they govern, have not stood us in good stead. But a future of violent change, presaged by the spread of separatisms, is frightening. ‘No back, no front’, as we say. We have to reimagine ourselves and our societies all over again, but the fact that this process ends so often in the secessionist ideal simply confirms what we know already: that our states have been hollowed out. There are two precedents for secession in postcolonial Africa: South Sudan, which required decades of war to achieve, and Eritrea, which was annexed by Ethiopia in the 1960s and fought for thirty years to break free. Ambazonia too has a fight on its hands, not only against the government in Yaoundé but against Europe’s lingering hold, which determined its territorial status and now frames the violence as a contest between two rival legacies. (Sadly none of our own West African languages can serve as a lingua franca now; many are quaint relics, only dimly celebrated.)

The abducted members of the Ambazonian government are still in detention in Cameroon, having been joined by 35 others, also abducted by the Nigerian authorities and forcibly returned to their country. It took six months for the Cameroonian government to admit that they were in detention in Yaoundé and that criminal proceedings had been opened against them. We also heard that they had been allowed to see their lawyers and representatives from the Red Cross. No charges have yet been preferred although they are expected quite soon. The men will be tried by a military court and once the death sentence is handed down – the likeliest outcome – President Biya will have to weigh the situation carefully, heeding the advice of the French – that is, if he’s still president, which is also a matter for the French to decide.

Culled from London Review of Books

Now that you are here

The Cameroon Concord News Group Board wishes to inform its faithful readers that for more than a decade, it has been providing world-class reports of the situation in Southern Cameroons.  The Board has been priding itself on its reports which have helped the world to gain a greater understanding of the crisis playing out in Southern Cameroons. It hails its reporters who have also helped the readers to have a broader perspective of the political situation in Cameroon.

The Board wishes to thank its readers who have continued to trust Southern Cameroon’s leading news platform. It is therefore using this opportunity to state that its reporters are willing to provide more quality information to the readers.    However, due to the changing global financial context, the Board is urging its readers to play a significant role in the financing of the news organization.  It is therefore calling on its faithful readers to make whatever financial contribution they can to ensure they get the latest developments in their native Southern Cameroons, in particular, and Cameroon in general.

Bank transaction: Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

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The Board looks forward to hearing from the readers.

Signed by the Group Chairman on behalf of the Board of Directors

Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Email: soteragbawebai@gmail.com

People in Ivory Coast have cast their ballots in municipal and regional elections, which came less than two years before the country’s presidential election in 2020.

Most of the polling stations opened at 08:00 (local and GMT) on Saturday and closed at 18:00.

Over six and a half million Ivorians took part in the elections to choose nearly 200 mayors and 31 heads of regional councils.

About 30,000 police, gendarmes, and soldiers were deployed across the West African country to ensure security on election day.

About 400 independent candidates had registered for the elections.

Tensions overshadowed the polls as the ruling RHDP coalition faced widespread divisions over who should be its candidate in the 2020 vote.

The two parties making up the ruling coalition — the RDR of President Alassane Dramane Ouattara, and the historically-dominant PDCI of former president Henri Konan Bedie — fielded rival candidates in many regions in the Saturday elections.

Reports said scuffles and clashes took place in several localities as campaigning was carried out in a very tense atmosphere.

Two people were reportedly injured and a man was stabbed to death during clashes between rival political groups in the country’s south.

In other incidents, voting urns were smashed and torched in Bonoua, east of the commercial capital, Abidjan.

There are concerns an RHDP implosion would bring back violence and unrest ahead of the 2020 presidential elections.

Source: Presstv

Authorities in Cameroon are appealing for calm after hundreds of youths marched through the streets of Yaounde, celebrating what they called the victory of their candidate, Maurice Kamtos, in Sunday’s presidential election. No results have been released yet from the election, in which eight candidates challenged longtime President Paul Biya.

Hundreds of young people demonstrating in the streets of the capital sing songs urging President Paul Biya to step down. They sing that they believe their candidate, Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement Party, won Sunday’s presidential election.

The demonstration began after Kamto declared victory in the polls, without giving any election results.

The ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement organized a news briefing that was broadcast live on state TV to counter the declaration made by Kamto.

Party Central Committee Secretary-General Jean Nkuete said Kamto exploited the naivete of the youths and sent them into the streets in an effort to win power at all costs.

Nkuete accused Kamto of breaking the law by announcing that he won the election.

“We express our surprise, our indignation and worry in the face of such irresponsible declaration that has no foundation. They are doing this in a bid to cause an uprising of the population to defend an imaginary victory,” he said.

Kamto is not the only candidate claiming victory. Cabral Libii of the opposition Universe Party announced he is leading the vote count.

Opposition candidate Garga Haman of the Alliance for Democracy and Development says two candidates want to create social unrest to oust President Paul Biya, who has led Cameroon for 36 years.

“Those two candidates are in a hurry to go to Etoudi [to be president]. Not yet my dear friends, not yet. Let us wait for the decision of the constitutional council. There is no reason to go on to the streets. Do not exploit the mentality of the youths,” he said.

Cameroon’s electoral code states election results are proclaimed by the Constitutional Council 15 days after the polls. It forbids the early publication of results.

Government spokesman Issa Tchiroma says sanctions are being prepared for Kamto, Libii and anyone who takes it upon himself to publish results.

“There is a threat, a threat at home. It is unwise to describe the measures which are already taken and which will be implemented in case any need be [arises], but I invite you as a citizen and lover of your nation to stand against this horrible statement. Measures will be taken. What are they, well, by the efficiency you will notice that they are already taken,” said Tchiroma.

Sunday’s poll was marred by low turnout, especially in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions where armed separatists fighting for independence had vowed the polls will not take place.

Despite the turmoil, Biya, one of Africa’s longest serving leaders, is expected to win in the face of a deeply divided opposition.

Culled from the VOA

Two Cameroonian opposition parties agreed a coalition on Friday to jointly contest this weekend’s presidential polls, a spokesman said, in an effort to dislodge six-term President Paul Biya.

The announcement confirms rumours of an opposition manoeuver to try to defeat 85-year-old Biya at Sunday’s polls, but the new union will not include the main opposition Social Democratic Front’s hopeful Joshua Osih.

Akere Muna, leader of the People’s Development Front (FDP) agreed to “withdraw his candidacy… and to support Maurice Kamto,” leader of the Movement for the Rebirth of Cameroon (MRC), Muna’s spokesman said in a statement.

Kamto’s party alleged earlier on Friday that a “massive fraud” was underway to ensure the sitting president wins a seventh term.

Maurice Kamto’s campaign chief Paul-Eric Kingue said efforts to rig Sunday’s ballot “had the blessing” of the electoral commission.

“We won’t accept any result if this kind of fraud continues,” he said at a media briefing by Kamto’s MRC in the capital Yaounde.

Cameroon’s authorities have long faced accusations of unfairly favouring Biya, one of Africa’s longest serving rulers who won 78 percent of votes in 2011’s polls which were described as “flawed” by observers and the opposition.

‘Attempting to spread chaos’

Cameroon will vote amid tight security including a ban on internal travel by road, rail and air from 1700 GMT Saturday until the conclusion of voting.

The borders of the central African nation of 25 million people will also be sealed 48 hours ahead of voting day, according to a decree seen by AFP.

Kamto’s MRC has alleged that polling cards have been forged and that voter registration has continued despite the process being officially closed.

“In 62 percent of areas, the (ruling) Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement party is still adding names to the voter roll,” said Kingue.

“We’re not preparing for war, but wherever there is fraud, there will be a firm response.”

Communication Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary said in a statement that “measures have been taken… to prevent any actions that might create violence or disorder around the elections”.

He added that “political figures linked to foreign interests were preparing groups of agitators to stir-up violence in the event that the results don’t go their way”.

The minister did not specify who he was referring to.

“By attempting to spread chaos, they risk being unpleasantly surprised,” he said. The authorities would “not tolerate any disorder before, during or after the presidential vote,” he added.

Biya has been in power for 35 years and now faces seven opposition contenders following Muna’s withdrawal.

The opposition front-runners are Osih and Kamto.

(AFP)

On the morning of October 7, eight of Cameroon’s 10 regions will vote in a presidential election that could end the long-running leadership of Paul Biya, who has been in office since 1982 and was prime minister in the seven years before that.

Dissidents in the remaining two regions – the South West and North West – home to Cameroon’s English-speaking minority, have threatened a showdown. “There is localised violence in the Anglophone regions … more than 1,000 men have pledged to dislodge the elections in those regions by violence,” says Hans de Marie Heungoup, senior analyst for Central Africa at the International Crisis Group.

Besides fighting by Boko Haram in the Far North and North regions and rebel incursions from the Central African Republic into the Eastern region, Cameroon is largely beset by the Anglophone crisis, a separatist uprising with roots in the pre-World War I era when it was a German colony.

“We are very much on the brink of a civil war,” said Kah Walla, who is from an Anglophone region. She is the leader of the Cameroon People’s Party (CPP), but the group declined to put forward a candidate for the coming vote.

“Separatist groups have gotten to a stage where they control some territory and have promised violence if the authorities attempt to hold elections there and government has vowed to hold elections there. So the population is caught in the middle.”

Southern Cameroons became German Kamerun in 1885, eventually transiting to joint French and British administration. Opting not to join Nigeria as it sought independence in 1961, it instead joined the French Cameroons, which had already gained independence a year earlier.

By 1972, the federal republic of Cameroon had become a unitary state; while the south kept its English laws and academic system, the rest of the country stuck to the French legal system and the baccalaureate schooling alternative.

There are now complaints of marginalisation and a dearth of infrastructure in those English-speaking provinces, despite being home to the oil that accounts for 40 percent of the country’s GDP. People looking to go from Mamfe to Akwaya in the same region, for instance, travel through a Nigerian border town before returning to Cameroon – a journey that could take as long as a day – because of the roads’ terrible condition.

The elections won’t be free and fair. The system is already rigged to give the president a structural advantage-KAH WALLA, CAMEROON PEOPLE’S PARTY LEADER

Rising tensions and subsequent protests caused by these divisions snowballed spectacularly in 2016.

At least 400 people have died so far. A further 20,000 people have fled into neighbouring Nigeria as their villages were razed. Schools have been closed and a three-month internet shutdown was enforced in those provinces, forcing a few hundred untrained secessionist fighters to group and arm themselves against a military crackdown.

A recent poll by GICAM, Inter-Patronal Grouping of Cameroon said more than 6,000 jobs have been lost to the crisis. In the Northwest region, a dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed. Thousands have fled both provinces, moving to stay with friends and relatives elsewhere nationwide after threats by separatists who are expected to begin taking up arms in the days leading up to the elections.

Others remain trapped in their hometowns or in informal camps for displaced people in host communities.  Weeks ago, Bernard Bilai, the Southwest governor, went with a party of gendarmes to a popular motor park in Buea, capital of the region, to ask panicked people gathered there to remain.

Despite violence inflicted on them by both the military and rebel troops, many in the Anglophone areas are sympathetic to the secessionist cause, although this support is not voiced, say experts.

Early this year in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, the self-declared leader of the separatist agenda, Julius Ayuk Tabe, was arrested with nine others and has since being extradited to Cameroon for trial on charges of treason.

Who is running?

Eight presidential candidates are angling to retire Biya, who is seeking a fresh seven-year mandate in what could be his seventh term.

The frontrunners include Joshua Osih of the main opposition Social Democratic Front and Akere Muna, a veteran lawyer, former vice president of Transparency International and son of a former vice president of the Federal Republic of Cameroon running with the Front Populaire Pour Le Developpement (FPD).

Both are from the English-speaking provinces. Akere Munna is 66 years old and believes it is time for Cameroon to be run by someone from the Anglophone regions

There is also Maurice Kamto, who leads the Mouvement pour la Renaissance du Cameroun (MRC) party. He was justice minister during the 2008 constitutional amendments that revised presidential term limits and led the legal team in negotiations with Nigeria over the disputed Bakassi peninsula in the early 2000s. He has a strong following in the west of the country, where he hails from.

Most young people seem to favour Cabral Libii, an eloquent 38-year-old journalist with Univers Party and law lecturer at the University of Yaounde II.  Kamto and Libii have roots in the Francophone regions.

Key Issues

In 2014, Transparency International ranked Cameroon 136 out of 175 countries in a corruption index. An estimated 48 percent of Cameroon’s population lives below the poverty line.

In March, 85-year-old Biya – who reportedly presides over the country’s affairs while living in a five-star hotel in Geneva, more than 6754km away from the presidential palace in Yaounde – held his first cabinet meeting in three years.

“The key issues include unemployment and underemployment, which is generally seen as more important and sensitive than the Anglophone crisis to some of the candidates,” says a technocrat who requested anonymity out of fear of being targeted by the authorities.

Political reforms, such as issues relating to staying a federation and changing presidential term limits, are also on the table. “It’s time for a change,” the technocrat continues. “We’ve never had this many good candidates at once.

“Osih has deep political experience from his time in parliament; Muna has international experience. Same with Kamto.  “While I don’t rule out a coalition happening between the candidates post-elections … I don’t see the possibility of a coalition happening before the elections.”

The end of Biya?

It remains a tall order to dislodge the strongman of Cameroonian politics, experts and analysts say, warning that voter apathy and presidential gimmicks will be at play.

Presidential candidates have been made to pay a CFA 30million ($52,100) caution fee – to guarantee they won’t encourage their supporters to violence – and were given half that amount by the government to fund their campaigns barely two weeks before the elections.

“The elections won’t be free and fair,” says Walla, the CPP leader from the Anglophone region. “The system is already rigged to give the president a structural advantage. The minister of Territorial Administration, whose ministry supervises the elections, is a diehard Biya fan. Many of the district officers in the ministry who will count votes are helping relaunch Biya’s book on his political philosophy, so there is no line between the civil service and politics.”

Biya controls the police and military forces and has substantive influence over the electoral commission; he regularly appoints its chief. Its board members only quit their ruling party membership the day their appointments were announced.

The president also appoints all judges in the country. Members of the electorate have little faith in the biometric reader system put in place for the election and do not expect Biya to concede in the unlikely event of a loss.

Local media is also suspect, recently reporting a story about Ennovate Solutions, a supposed American election-monitoring organisation, predicting a landslide victory of 81 percent for the incumbent. The firm turned out to be a web design firm owned by a relative of Paul Nji, Biya’s minister of territorial administration.

Biya still has a strong base especially among his Beti kinsfolk, one of the major ethnic groups.

Serge Alomomou, a taxi driver in Yaounde, is one of them and blames French colonialists for the country’s problems.

“Every country has its own problems and we signed a lot of contracts with the French at independence that put us in this mess. I trust Biya and he knows the best for us, he knows us more than the people who want to try and replace him. It is those working around him that mess up his efforts.”

‘Mounting hate speech’

Over the past year, hate speech has risen.  A petition against controversial TV host Ernest Obama surfaced online last October over his frequent outbursts against the Anglophone community.

In June, Prime Minister Philemon Yang blamed Cameroonian citizens in the Diaspora for inciting their compatriots to violence on social media over the Anglophone issue.

Kamto, the candidate and former justice minister, has lambasted TV host Obama’s channel, Vision 4. He pulled out of a debate on the network because, he wrote on Facebook, it “promotes division and hatred among Cameroonians, particularly against the innocent English-speaking Cameroonian population trapped between secessionist activities and security forces”.

The MRC party chief has himself been accused of stoking tribal tensions between his own Bamileke people and Biya’s Beti people, two of Cameroon’s major ethnic groups.

“There are ethnic and political tensions we can see mounting between the Bamileke and Beti ethnicities,” says Heungoup. “There is mounting hate speech and it is worrying because, in Cameroon, most of the candidates have regional bases, so what if any of them decides to reject the results?”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS

When school teachers took to the streets of Bamenda, a city in northwestern Cameroon, with thousands of others in November 2016, at least two people were killed by security forces that responded violently.

That event has become the rallying point for a crisis that has snowballed into an agitation for secession by the only two English-speaking regions in the country.

The North West and South West provinces, Cameroon’s only English-speaking regions, had long protested against perceived marginalisation by the political class accused of deliberately under-developing the regions.

The regions had merged with French-speaking Cameroon in 1961 through a referendum, decades after Cameroon, a German colony before World War I (1914-1918), was split into two and separately put under the control of France and Britain.

Even though federalism was established in the country in 1961, it was scrapped in 1972 by then-president, Ahmadou Ahidjo. Now, the North West and South West regions only make up two of Cameroon’s 10 semi-autonomous administrative regions.

With the two regions being in the minority, it has long accused the central government of implementing policies deemed to be discriminatory to English-speakers, particularly in the education and judicial systems.

The teachers’ protest had happened just a month after the regions’ lawyers staged a similar protest to demand reforms that’ll address what was described as the overbearing use of French in the bilingual country.

While teachers complained that the education system in the English-speaking regions is too French-oriented to the detriment of English-speaking students, lawyers revolted against the increasing presence of Francophone magistrates and a French civil law system.

This scrutiny extended into other sectors of the country especially in politics where the important positions are believed to also be taken by more French speakers.

With the events that have transpired since 2016, separatist groups have now taken over the agitation to demand an independent new state called “Ambazonia”.

The government has massively cracked down on the regions over the past two years, leading to violent clashes between anti-government separatists and the country’s security forces.

When several negotiations between the government and leaders of the regions failed, they were arrested and thrown behind bars, further making the situation worse.

In their bid to force the government’s hands, Anglophone leaders instituted “Operation Ghost Town”, mandating citizens in the affected regions to stay at home with all institutions closed.

This resulted in one of the high points of the crisis when, in January 2017, the nation’s long-serving president, Paul Biya, shut down internet services in the Anglophone regions. The internet blackout was not lifted until April 2017, after 92 days which didn’t help to ease tensions in the troubled regions. The internet blackout was widely condemned for damaging the local economy and suppressing free speech.

Despite the government’s violent crackdown and meeting room diplomacy, the agitations refused to die down and further came to a head when security forces killed at least 40 people during the brutal suppression of protests across major towns and villages in the Northwest and Southwest in September 2017.

Separatists were soon getting bolder and started carrying out attacks just months later in November, killing at least six security officers. With bomb explosions also going off in Bamenda, Biya was compelled to declare war against the separatists in December 2017.

“I think that things are becoming clearer to everyone now that Cameroon is victim to repeated terrorist attacks from a secessionist group.

“In the face of such repeated aggression, I’ll like to assure Cameroonians that measures have been taken to eliminate these criminals and bring back peace throughout the national territory,”he declared.

Some of Biya’s attempts to end the crisis includes the creation of a Common Law department at the Supreme Court and the School of Administration and Magistracy.

In January 2017, he also created a National Commission for Bilingualism and Multiculturalism as part of a response to address grievances of the regions.

His attempts have been deemed to be too insignificant or coming too late by the leaders agitating for the affected regions.

Fighters are now persistently locked in bloody battles with security forces in a conflict that’s believed to have claimed at least 400 lives.

This has resulted in a massive exodus of civilians with thousands of them fleeing from the violence in the troubled regions, as recently reported by the New York Times.

A common scene at the Buea bus terminal. The UN estimates that 246,000 people have fled their homes in the southwest for other parts of Cameroon

While many leave the regions to seek refuge in Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, tens of thousands are also holed up in refugee camps in neighbouring Nigeria.

In May, 2018, as a direct consequence of the crisis in the Anglophone regions, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants, and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI) announced the registration of 21,291 Cameroonian refugees in 40 different locations across four states of Nigeria including Cross River, Benue, Akwa Ibom and Taraba. This massive influx happened in just seven months with the number projected to rise even higher to around 40,000.

With the nation’s presidential election scheduled to hold on October 7, 2018, the mass exodus of people from the Anglophone regions is set to pose a problem for Biya as he seeks a seventh term in office after already governing for 35 years.

Supporters of Cameroonian President Paul Biya gather at a stadium in Maroua for a campaign rally

Separatists have already placed a ban on voting in the troubled regions and electoral officers and government officials are among the hordes of people that have already taken flight.

It remains to be seen how this will eventually factor into the election, but the crisis has already cost the Central African nation too many lives and put so many more on hold.

Culled from the Pulse.ng

Cameroonians prepare to go to the polls on Sunday, October 7, 2018; as campaigns among the various presidential aspirants intensify throughout the national territory.

Elections were conducted in the past by the Ministry of Territorial Administration, elsewhere the Ministry of Interior until the setting up in December 2006 of an independent body, Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), to take over the organization, management and the supervision of elections.

During the more than two decades of one-party rule, elections were considered a mere formality due to the fact that voters were not offered a choice between different political parties.

However, the situation changed radically with the return to political pluralism. Elections became hotly contested with uncertain outcomes and looming threats of violence as it was alleged that election management procedures favored the ruling party coupled with numerous irregularities.

The Electoral System

The President of the Republic is elected for a seven-year term by universal suffrage and by direct, equal and secret ballot.

According to the Cameroon electoral code, the president is elected by a single-round majority ballot and the candidate having obtained the majority of the votes cast shall be declared elected.

It also states that election will not be complete until Cameroon’s Supreme Court rules on requests for annulment and announces the results.

According to ELECAM guidelines, every person of Cameroonian nationality of either sex, who has reached the age of 20 years, is registered and is free from all cases of disqualification provided for by law, is entitled to vote.

Candidates for the office of President of the Republic are expected to be in full possession of their civic and political rights and must be aged 35 years and above by the date of election and will have to show proof of having resided in Cameroon for an uninterrupted period of at least 12 (twelve) months.

The Voting process

The biometric registration of voters is carried out by the country’s election governing body, Elections Cameroon, ELECAM, prior to the elections. Polling is usually organized on a Sunday or a day declared a public holiday and lasts a single day.

The electoral code provides that one polling station is set up for a maximum of 500 electors and every polling station shall be located in public premises or in premises open to the public.

Each voter is allowed into the polling station after presenting their voter’s card and proving their identity by producing their national identity card.

Source: Africa News