Mandatory voting, lowering the security deposit and modifying the Electoral Council’s composition… We list out the main points of the reform project that the opposition was prevented by police from presenting on 24 November as planned.

The show of force had an unexpected effect. On 24 November, police and gendarmes were deployed in large numbers in front of the Hilton Hotel in Yaoundé, where the opposition was due to officially present its draft reform of the electoral code.

The organisers had no choice but to postpone the event at the last minute, so the guests had to leave. Even so, against all odds, the police’s muscular intervention put the initiative back in the spotlight. Launched by seven political parties last March, it seemed to have disappeared from the radar.

What does this 231-page document, which the opposition is now distributing to all public officials and diplomats in Yaoundé, contain? According to the technical secretariat that contributed to it, 15 political parties, 12 civil society organisations and about 50 citizens responded to the call for contributions that was launched.

The proposals, which mainly concern the electoral code’s provisions that require some modifications, were analysed, excluding those that could require the Constitution to be revised. “This is the minimum acceptable for the elections to take place smoothly,” say the members of the opposition.

The standard and the unexpected

Some of these proposals are fairly standard: introducing a single ballot paper; lengthening the duration of electoral campaigns (30 days instead of 15); lowering the security deposit required for legislative elections (from 3m CFA francs ($5,165) to 500,000 CFA francs per candidate) and municipal (from 50,000 CFA francs to 25,000 CFA francs); and prohibiting polling stations from being set up in barracks or chieftaincies.

THE RACE TO TRANSFORM

Others are more surprising, such as making voting compulsory. This would complement Article 2 of the electoral law, which currently stipulates that the election is by universal, equal and secret suffrage, and that it can be direct or indirect. The measure aims to reduce the abstention rates observed in recent elections. During the last local elections in February 2020, turnout was just over 40%.

The opposition has fear and doubts regarding the neutrality, representativeness and independence of the Electoral Council.

To remedy this, it has proposed that the 18-member body be composed – in future – of eight representatives from parties sitting in the Assembly; three representatives from parties only present in municipal councils; three figures from the three parties whose candidates emerged top during the last presidential election; two representatives from the administration that were chosen by the president of the Republic who have had no political affiliation for at least three years; and two members of the civil society.

The minutes from the 2018 presidential election proved to be a stumbling block while the case was being examined before the Constitutional Council. In general, the authenticity of the documents transmitted to the Commission Nationale de Recensement des Votes was often questioned.

The opposition therefore proposed establishment of a communal commission that will be responsible for supervising votes, ensuring the conformity of the minutes and be above the departmental commission. The objective is to reduce the risk of litigation at the national level. The same document adds that all the minutes should have the same legal value, but that today, only the Elecam’s PV is valid in case of dispute.

Another proposed change – which would amend Articles 133, 168 and 194 of the electoral code – is that post-election disputes be examined after the provisional results have been announced. Therefore, the body would only be able to proclaim an election’s final results once the Constitutional Council settles any possible post-election disputes.

Source: The Africa Report

Mandatory voting, lowering the security deposit and modifying the Electoral Council’s composition… We list out the main points of the reform project that the opposition was prevented by policefrom presenting on 24 November as planned.

The show of force had an unexpected effect. On 24 November, police and gendarmes were deployed in large numbers in front of the Hilton Hotel in Yaoundé, where the opposition was due to officially present its draft reform of the electoral code.

The organisers had no choice but to postpone the event at the last minute, so the guests had to leave. Even so, against all odds, the police’s muscular intervention put the initiative back in the spotlight. Launched by seven political parties last March, it seemed to have disappeared from the radar.

What does this 231-page document, which the opposition is now distributing to all public officials and diplomats in Yaoundé, contain? According to the technical secretariat that contributed to it, 15 political parties, 12 civil society organisations and about 50 citizens responded to the call for contributions that was launched.

The proposals, which mainly concern the electoral code’s provisions that require some modifications, were analysed, excluding those that could require the Constitution to be revised. “This is the minimum acceptable for the elections to take place smoothly,” say the members of the opposition.

The standard and the unexpected

Some of these proposals are fairly standard: introducing a single ballot paper; lengthening the duration of electoral campaigns (30 days instead of 15); lowering the security deposit required for legislative elections (from 3m CFA francs ($5,165) to 500,000 CFA francs per candidate) and municipal (from 50,000 CFA francs to 25,000 CFA francs); and prohibiting polling stations from being set up in barracks or chieftaincies.

THE RACE TO TRANSFORM

Others are more surprising, such as making voting compulsory. This would complement Article 2 of the electoral law, which currently stipulates that the election is by universal, equal and secret suffrage, and that it can be direct or indirect. The measure aims to reduce the abstention rates observed in recent elections. During the last local elections in February 2020, turnout was just over 40%.

The opposition has fear and doubts regarding the neutrality, representativeness and independence of the Electoral Council.

To remedy this, it has proposed that the 18-member body be composed – in future – of eight representatives from parties sitting in the Assembly; three representatives from parties only present in municipal councils; three figures from the three parties whose candidates emerged top during the last presidential election; two representatives from the administration that were chosen by the president of the Republic who have had no political affiliation for at least three years; and two members of the civil society.

The minutes from the 2018 presidential election proved to be a stumbling block while the case was being examined before the Constitutional Council. In general, the authenticity of the documents transmitted to the Commission Nationale de Recensement des Votes was often questioned.

The opposition therefore proposed establishment of a communal commission that will be responsible for supervising votes, ensuring the conformity of the minutes and be above the departmental commission. The objective is to reduce the risk of litigation at the national level. The same document adds that all the minutes should have the same legal value, but that today, only the Elecam’s PV is valid in case of dispute.

Another proposed change – which would amend Articles 133, 168 and 194 of the electoral code – is that post-election disputes be examined after the provisional results have been announced. Therefore, the body would only be able to proclaim an election’s final results once the Constitutional Council settles any possible post-election disputes.

Source: The Africa Report

On Nov. 12, riots broke out in the city of Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s Northwest region, in response to the killing of 8-year-old Brandy Tataw by a stray bullet after a police officer fired a live round at a car that had supposedly not obeyed orders at a checkpoint.

After the killing, residents took to the streets with tree branches, a traditional symbol for peace, and expressed their outrage. The protests soon turned violent, with buildings burned and the military firing into the crowd. The scenes in Bamenda nearly mirrored those in Buea, the capital of the Southwest region, a month prior, when 5-year-old Caro Louise Ndialle was killed by security forces under similar circumstances and furious bystanders beat to death the officer who fired the fatal shot.

Weeks later, on Nov. 24, unidentified gunmen attacked a school in Ekondo Titi in the Southwest region, killing three students and a teacher. The government blamed secessionists, who in turn blamed other groups within the splintered Anglophone movement and the Cameroonian government.

The Anglophone crisis in Cameroon has escalated in recent months at the hands of all parties to the conflict. The crisis began in 2016 as peaceful protests by lawyers and teachers demanding linguistic reforms but rapidly escalated into a war of secession that has killed thousands of people and displaced over a million. To many in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, the recent killings are not new but instead a continuation of the heavy-handed techniques, corruption, and impunity demonstrated by the security forces.

In the aftermath of the killings, multiple factions of the divided separatist movement announced retaliatory measures, ranging from restarting a ban on all schooling, a controversial policy that they claim is to keep children safe but is seen by many on the ground to be a means of maintaining leverage and exerting control over the population, to calls to attack all members of the military.

These are far from the only recent escalations in the conflict. On Nov. 10, an explosive device was detonated inside a lecture hall at the University of Buea and injured 11 students. Just days before, a taxi driver was killed when his car exploded in the same city. The explosions followed widespread shock after passengers were forced out of a bus and tortured by separatist fighters, purportedly for not obeying orders to enact a “ghost town.”

The idea of a ghost town—similar to a general strike, albeit enforced—was originally a means for the civilian population to demonstrate their support for the striking lawyers and teachers, but it has come to be seen on the ground as an oppressive tool used by the Anglophone diaspora to demonstrate their control. While calls to create ghost towns have not been strictly followed in recent months, the explosions and attacks have caused a new sense of fear among the population.

These actions reflect a hardening of positions by all parties to the conflict, underscoring that it will continue unless the two sides shift their focus from zero-sum approaches, denials of the conflict’s severity, and infighting. However, actions by both parties indicate that the opposite is occurring.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the Cameroonian government has been in denial, hiding the burning of villages and attempting to blame the separatists for atrocities that it later took responsibility for. The government has attempted to unilaterally propose solutions that do not address the conflict’s root causes.

It held a national dialogue in 2019 that was boycotted by separatists, which led to the implementation of decades-old changes to the Cameroonian Constitution through regional elections held in December 2020. The opposition and many civil society groups boycotted these elections while the government continued to commit the very abuses that led to the conflict in the first place.

The government has continued this denial and taken its heavy-handed approach to the conflict even further. In October, Cameroon’s foreign minister summoned the diplomatic corps in Yaoundé, the capital, and said the government had undertaken “expensive and extensive structural and administrative reforms” to address the conflict, saying they demonstrated the government’s commitment to ending it.

In reality, the government allowed nascent peace talks with imprisoned separatist leaders to fall victim to political infighting and has continued to state that symbolic actions that do not include separatists are a sufficient means of addressing Anglophone grievances. Doing so continues to show its unwillingness to accept responsibility for allowing the crisis to escalate, its continued human rights abuses, and a refusal to engage in meaningful talks.

Recently, the government has taken its disproportionate and heavy-handed approach beyond its own borders, particularly into Nigeria. Nigeria hosts more than 60,000 refugees from the conflict but has also served as a source of materials including armaments and medical treatment for separatist fighters, who take advantage of the porous border between the two countries.

While Nigeria facilitated the arrest and extradition of separatist leaders to Cameroon in 2018, an act that was later declared illegal by local courts, Anglophone Cameroonians had largely been able to live in the country with minimal interference from authorities. This situation has changed rapidly in recent months.

Anglophone Cameroonians have been facing unprecedented levels of harassment and intimidation at the hands of Nigerian authorities, including extrajudicial deportation to Cameroon, often resulting in being imprisoned and tortured once being handed over. This often takes the form of joint operations against those accused of supporting separatists but regularly leads to civilians being harassed, picked up, tortured, and deported.

In other cases, the Cameroonian military has crossed into Nigeria in search of separatist fighters, leading to complaints from Nigerian villagers about harassment and intimidation by the foreign forces. When Cameroonian forces crossed into Nigeria earlier in the conflict, it led to a diplomatic standoff between Yaoundé and Abuja. Now, it seems to be done in coordination between the two. Some observers speculate this is the result of a visit by Cameroonian officials to Abuja in July, after which the Nigerian government stated it would ensure that its country was not a safe haven for separatists in Cameroon.

Some speculate that this is the result of a partnership, announced in April, between one of the major Cameroonian secessionist groups, the Ambazonia Governing Council, and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group in Nigeria. The Cameroonian government has taken advantage of the secessionist issue in an effort to convince Nigerian officials that both governments face the same threat. Cameroonian leaders frequently mention shared security challenges along the countries’ southern border and even congratulated the Nigerian government on its arrest of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu this year.

Cameroon’s Government Is Deceiving the West While Diverting Foreign Aid

Paul Biya’s regime is ignoring the battle against Boko Haram and the Islamic State and using foreign counterterrorism assistance to fund its brutal repression of citizens with legitimate grievances.

As the Nigerian government faces an increase in attacks by secessionist groups across its southwest, and responds by arresting more separatist leaders and threatening brutal retaliation, it is easy to depict the coordination as an extension of its domestic strategy to those perceived to support secession in neighboring Cameroon.

However, the fears underlying this approach are not well founded. It ignores the historically tense relationship between the Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria and the Anglophone populations of Cameroon, which has its roots in the colonial period. Moreover, the Ambazonia Governing Council is only one of several groups that comprise the bitterly divided secessionist movement in Cameroon, and cooperation between secessionists and Nigerian fighters has occurred throughout the conflict. Similarly, if any party to the recent accord were to benefit from the agreement, it would be the Ambazonian secessionists, who are far less established than the paramilitary wing of the IPOB.

Refugees living in Nigeria acknowledge that this argument could be used by the Cameroonian government, which has long been angered by the safe haven it saw Nigeria as providing to separatists. Regardless of its source, a climate of fear and distress now exists among refugees in Nigeria, with many believing the country they fled to is no longer safe.

Although the government bears the bulk of responsibility for the conflict and its continuation, actions by separatists in recent months have similarly caused the conflict to escalate.

Until recently, separatist fighters, composed of loosely formed groups with shifting allegiances to the bitterly divided diaspora, have predominantly relied on ambushes, kidnappings, and similar means. However, this year, separatist fighters have increased the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) across Cameroon’s two Anglophone regions.

Between January and April, separatists planted at least 27 IEDs that detonated across the Northwest and Southwest regions, more than in all previous years of the conflict combined. Such attacks have continued, with 15 soldiers killed in two IED attacks in September alone. These attacks have not only led to heightened fear among the Cameroonian security forces in the two regions who already were suffering from low morale but have also had a negative impact on efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance.

In addition to the use of IEDs, separatist groups have become more daring in their attacks. In early October, Cameroonian Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute was rushed to safety when separatist fighters began shooting in his vicinity in the Northwest region. Similarly, targets previously seen as “off-limits,” such as traditional leaders, are now being regularly kidnapped, tortured, or even killed.

The separatists, while insisting that they are open to dialogue, have neglected to resolve the infighting within the movement that has prevented potentially promising opportunities for mediation from taking hold. The use of IEDs and an uptick in attacks have undoubtedly impacted the Cameroonian military, leading it to take more brazen actions such as forming civilian militias. However, the attacks have also increased the public’s fear of being targeted or caught up in an explosion, solidifying the sentiment that neither side is serving the interests of civilians in the war-torn regions.

While the outrage that was evident on the streets of Buea and Bamenda was directly sparked by the killing of two girls, it is emblematic of the resentment that the population of Cameroon’s Anglophone regions has felt as the conflict has escalated in recent months. This is the result of actions by both the government and separatist fighters, along with a lack of progress toward resolving the conflict.

Unless the two sides accept that concessions will have to be made and that the current zero-sum approach, fraught with infighting, is untenable, such escalations will continue. The tragic result will be more scenes mirroring those that occurred in Buea and Bamenda. Only a negotiated settlement that addresses the long-standing and genuine grievances of the Anglophone minority through fundamental changes to how Cameroon is governed will lead to a sustainable  resolution of the conflict—but each escalation in the conflict makes this more difficult.

Any resolution will require the secessionist movement to resolve its entrenched infighting and understand that the desires of the populations living in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions may not be entirely aligned with the demands of activists in the diaspora. Finally, the Cameroonian government must accept its role in sparking the conflict, ranging from the decades-long marginalization of the Anglophone minority to recent human rights violations. Only after these initial steps are taken could confidence-building measures and an eventual negotiated settlement be possible.

Culled from Foreign Policy

Five years into the war in Southern Cameroons, the Biya French Cameroun occupying regime’s attempts to criminalize the struggle of the Ambazonian people have failed.

“The killing of our people including women and children will not deter us from continuing to defend our homeland by all legitimate means through self defense,” Vice President Dabney Yerima told the Ambazonia war cabinet late on Sunday.

Dabney Yerima said resisting La Republique du Cameroun occupation by all available means, including armed resistance, is a right granted to people under occupation all over the world and protected by international law.

Yerima observed that the Paris that fought for the rights of French speaking Canadians has been bias in favour of the French Cameroun regime and its policies that are based on murder, terror, massacre, and destruction.

The Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government concluded that Ambazonian noble fighters, and the rest of the resistance factions will continue to fight the enemy until achieving liberation and victory.

The ongoing armed conflict in the territory of the Southern Cameroons has finally redefined itself. It has redefined itself from a war simply of self-defense against the predatory onslaught of France through its vassal state of French Cameroun, to a decolonization war. It is a decolonization war against France, French Cameroun and its hawkish Bulu-Beti minority tribe. That tribe dominates and controls the government, the legislature, the judiciary, and the military in French Cameroun. It believes the people of the Southern Cameroons and their territory must remain imprisoned under French Cameroun colonization, spoliation, and occupation.

By Chi Prudence Asong with additional reporting  

Most French speaking Cameroonians are now feeling uncertain on the bill of health and mental fitness of the 88-year-old President Biya.

A recent video of the dictator presently circulating on social media showed a very weak Biya and has prompted many politically docile French speaking Cameroonians to disagree with the statement that Biya is in good health.

“Biya is no more physically and mentally fit for office” a French Cameroun political commentator said last week.

The Beti Ewondo regime’s overall approval rating is now at its greatest low with civil administrators blaming the war in Southern Cameroons on Anglophone teachers.

A majority of French Cameroun ruling clans and tribes now disapprove of Biya and his CPDM party’s performance and many are saying that Biya should go and go now.

Biya and his men are also facing harsh criticism from every segment of the society including the Roman Catholic Church.

The Francophone dictator is also under pressure for corruption in the military, the senseless war in Southern Cameroons, the disturbing security situation in the East and the reemergence of Boko Haram in the Far North including the poor handling of Covid-19 funds.

By Chi Prudence Asong

The Swiss Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Swiss government are trying to relaunch their stalled mediation efforts for the English-speaking regions of Cameroon, as fighting intensifies there.

The Swiss were part of the Southern Cameroons Retreat that recently held in Toronto, Canada to examine the possiblity of bringing to an end the Southern Cameroons crisis that is in its fifth year and has been spreading death and destruction among the people of Southern Cameroons.

The Toronto meeting organizers included the U.S. State Department, the Vatican, Canada, Ireland, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, the United Nations, and Greenclee which negotiated the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

Cameroon Concord News understands that the quality of those who attended the meeting inspired hope to Southern Cameroonians all over the globe including those in Ground Zero and Ground 1.

Since the Southern Cameroons crisis hit the global stage some five years ago, some 10,000 Cameroonians have been killed, with army soldiers accounting for close to 35% of the deaths.

Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been maimed and scarred for life in a conflict that could have been addressed through negotiations and genuine dialogue.

As of today, some one million Southern Cameroonians are either  internally displaced or are seeking refuge in a neighboring country due to a conflict many observers say was avoidable.

Thousands of army soldiers whose consciences could not allow them to kill innocent civilians have left the country to escape the harsh punishment the government inflicts on soldiers who do not want to implement the decisions of the top military brass.

By Isong Asu in London