24, January 2019
Of Biya and the Chinese, CDC, PAMOL and business tycoon Danpullo 0
The Chinese government recently announced that it has written off almost $78m (£60m) from Cameroon’s debt as part of measures to ease economic hardship in the country, but it is evidently clear that China is exploiting a desperate regime that is taking the last kicks of a dying horse and playing for greater access to Cameroon resources.
Beijing and Yaounde made public the debt relief announcement on Friday last week shortly after a meeting between the 85 year old President Paul Biya and Yang Jiechi, a special representative of China’s President Xi Jinping.
Chinese media houses also reported that Cameroon’s total debt burden to China stands at almost $5.7bn (£4.4bn), citing figures from the Autonomous Sinking Fund, the public entity that manages Cameroon’s external debt. We also gathered from the Biya-Yang Jiechi press release that the sum of $78m that has been wiped is money that should have been paid in 2018, but which Cameroon failed to pay.
Finally, the Chinese have taken over Cameroon (to be precise) French Cameroun and the roots of Chinese colonization are very deep that not even the French can decolonized. The Chinese gesture without mincing words is NOT an act of charity. We now have evidence that Biya and his ruling CPDM gang have handed over the mines in the East region and the iron ore deposits in the South to the Chinese.
President Biya flew to China for the third Summit of the China-Africa Cooperation in September and pleaded with Chinese authorities to ease Cameroon’s debt burden. The Special Representative of China’s President Xi Jinping has been quoted by our intelligence sources in Yaoundé as saying that Xi Jinping made it very clear to Biya “If you cannot pay, then hand over the mines to us.”
The Chinese are not in Cameroon to play; they are pursuing a well-calculated mission of taking over the country. Russia is already installing a military base in the Central African Republic that will benefit both Beijing and Moscow if the French attempt to disrupt the plan.
A French Cameroun ministerial task team established by the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo regime has reported that CDC and PAMOL are now a thing of the past. We of this publication think, Biya and his crime syndicate should be held responsible for the collapse of these two gigantic agro-industrial plants as the leadership of the CDC and PAMOL are both connected to the crimes committed against Southern Cameroonians.
Governor Okalia Bilai (Board Chair PAMOL) and Itoe Benjamin (Board Chair CDC) including the general managers were among the so-called South West Elites who ordered Nkemgu Martin to read a communiqué addressed to President Biya demanding the deployment of more troops to kill the laborers, their children and the local population working in these plantations. They must now face the far reaching consequences of their actions.
Baba Danpullo’s empire too is collapsing at catastrophic rapidity! The internet shut down in Southern Cameroons greatly affected the man who is a chartered Biya business partner. He wrongfully thought that the crisis in Southern Cameroons was a repeat of the CPDM/SDF political tug-of-war in 1990. Correspondingly, he attempted to put the Muslim population at daggers-drawn positions with the people of Southern Cameroons. That venture failed and today the Vietnamese who originally owned Nexttel are soon to take him to an international court. He is the right man to tell Biya that it is cheaper to talk for 1000 years than to fight for just a day.
By Rita Akana in Yaounde
25, January 2019
Biya owes much of his survival to a longstanding relationship with various French gov’ts 0
On 6 November 2018, 85-year-old Paul Biya was sworn in for his seventh term as president of Cameroon, extending his 36-year rule. It is remarkable, more so considering that up to 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 25. It means that the vast majority of Cameroonians have never known a president other than Biya and have never lived through a truly free and fair election, where anyone other than Biya could win.
The question of longevity in office has been a focus for political organizing in many parts of the world since the 1990s, when one-party regimes fell apart – unable to sustain themselves after the Cold War. Many of the long-serving leaders of that era owed their survival to client relationships with the US and the Soviet Union. When the superpowers no longer needed them, there was finally enough space for democracy to take root. Only a handful of countries in Africa and Asia have resisted this transition, and the case of Paul Biya highlights why.
In crude terms, Cameroon was a second-tier state that was more interesting to secondary Western powers – namely France – than it was to either the US or the Soviets. Indeed, Biya owes much of his survival in power to a longstanding relationship with various French administrations. As such, despite the cloud of violence surrounding this latest election, France’s president Emmanuel Macron was one of a handful of leaders who congratulated Biya on his election victory in a letter (which Biya published on his Facebook page) that the Élysée claimed was supposed to remain private.
Nor have other nations made any tangible moves to distance themselves from Biya. Despite the mounting domestic resistance to his regime, particularly in the Anglophone region of the country, Biya travels the world freely. He frequents the InterContinental hotel in Geneva, where Cameroonians allege he spends more time than in Yaoundé. He regularly attends African Union Heads of State meetings and recently turned a three-day Africa-China summit in Beijing into a two-week trip.
When a president has been in power for 36 years in a country where elections should nominally change the leadership, it’s logical to ask, ‘Why aren’t the locals resisting?’ But in Cameroon, regional and international institutions do their best to nullify any local resistance. The army and the police have a nominal monopoly on the use of force and a relatively limitless access to weapons, training and other tools. And because the arms trade remains one of the least regulated industries in the world, after a while the only recourse left for those who resist is armed conflict, if the central state is unwilling to negotiate.
Thus, in 2015, citizens in the Anglophone region of Cameroon began a peaceful campaign to protest poor access to government services. That protest was met by violence from the army and the state, and has since morphed into a full rebellion. A secessionist campaign has been brutally countered by state violence and collective punishment of civilians. But this information is broadly kept out of the mainstream media by restricting access to the restive regions. By controlling how information about Cameroon is created and disseminated, Biya manages to shield the country from scrutiny, leaving Cameroonians to resist his regime by themselves.
Never-ending presidential terms are a hot topic right now in Africa, with the youngest population in the world, and in Cameroon, with a gap between an 85-year-old president and a population with an average age of 18.5, it looks particularly absurd. Biya’s Cameroon highlights that change is not just about sheer demographic numbers but power, violence and political institutions. Longevity is also a chance to ask important questions about the international systems that connect and sustain regimes around the world.
Source: New Internationalist