13, January 2020
Mvomeka’a Palace: Biya’s final hideout 0
French Cameroun dictator Paul Biya is spending more and more secluded time in his palace in Mvomeka’a, his native village in the south of the country. The 86 year old thug calls it his haven of peace, from which locals are kept away. The Mvomeka’s palace has become one of the centers of power and the object of all fantasies in French Cameroun.
To get to the palace, one has to drive through a wide road in the heart of the French Cameroun rainforest. It is a neat floor marking road with perfect layout, potholes non-existent: it looks great. Some political commentators have opined that the road which does not bring anything into the French Cameroun economy remains the first major achievement of President Paul Biya shortly after he came to power in 1982. The road simply links Yaoundé, the capital via Sangmélima, one of the cities of his childhood, and Mvomeka’a, his native village.
For a majority of French Cameroonians – who have never set foot there – Mvomeka’a is a privileged settlement. Among locals, this palace, which they are kept away from, sometimes generates frustration.
Biya feels better in Mvomeka’a. He goes there several times a year. With age telling on him, the average length of his numerous stay has gradually lengthened: whereas he spent only a few days each time a few years ago, he now stays there for several weeks in a row, or even more than a month.
At the entrance to the village, a checkpoint blocks the road. One of three soldiers on guard has the responsibility of checking identification papers of those going into the village. Everyone in the area from 5-year-old kids to 75-year-olds, everyone there is involved in intelligence gathering all in a bid to protect Biya and his family.
A member of the presidential guard recently told Biya that he was on the brink because Ambazonia Restoration Forces have promised to attack him. In Mvomeka’a, the threat is taken very seriously, even when he (Biya) is away.
The dictator who governs the nation like a tribal chief usually travels to Mvomeka’a by road, escorted by two helicopters. It was at Mvomeka’a that he built his first residence, an unpretentious white villa, after his studies in France in the 1960s.
When he became Prime Minister, he built a second villa with support from his late wife, Jeanne-Irene, who died in 1992. The current palace was the idea of the late wife who pushed Biya to buy neighboring lands in order to install his relatives and extend his private presidential site.
Inside the Mvomeka’a palace there are apartments for his aide-de-camp, the director of the civil cabinet, the chief of protocol and his butler. There are also family villas, including those of his late sister and mother, which now look like abandoned property. Today, Mvomeka’a belongs almost exclusively to Biya and his family. But no one other than Biya and his wife Chantal lives in the grounds of Mvomeka’a palace shrouded in mystery.
Perched on the hilly side of the village, the Mvomeka’a palace evokes a romantic oasis for the frail president with an insatiable love for classical music. An endless green grid lined with a gigantic screen of conifers hides the palace from prying eyes. From the top of the palace watchtower, sentry guns in hand are watching for the slightest suspicious gesture. No one is allowed to hang around. From a distance, the most daring can glimpse the family cemetery, where the former first lady, the president’s mother and brother, as well as her stepmother were buried.
Doctors, counselors and general secretaries are regularly summoned to Mvomeka’a with files under their arms to meet Biya in his village where he consults and holds crisis meetings. According to one of Biya’s relatives, these retreats allow Biya to concentrate, away from the harassment of courtiers and other seekers of favors. The Mvomeka’a palace has 260 employees.
By Asu Isong with files from Jeune Afrique
14, January 2020
Biya Francophone regime grants ‘special status’ to Southern Cameroons. They don’t feel special 0
In the last week of 2019, Cameroon’s parliament approved a bill that will grant “special status” to the country’s two Anglophone regions. This initiative was a result of the Grand National Dialogue that the government convened in October purportedly to resolve the war of secession that has killed at least 3,000 people and displaced over half a million since its outbreak in 2017.
The government says that awarding “special status” to the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions will give Cameroon’s Anglophone minority greater autonomy over local affairs and settle historical grievances. According to the administration of President Paul Biya, this will mean secessionist forces will no longer have a reason to fight.
For their part, separatists have roundly rejected the measure as illegitimate. This is at least in part due to the fact it emerged out of a Grand National Dialogue that few outside of the ruling CPDM party regarded as a genuine effort to end the conflict. All secessionist factions as well much of civil society boycotted the talks, while opposition politicians that did attend, such as Akere Muna, walked out in protest over the lack of discussion on controversial topics such as the form of the state.
How special is special?
Nonetheless, it is worth examining the contents of the “special status” on its own merits.
To begin with, there is everything that will not change under the bill. For instance, the president will still appoint governors – who can come from outside the region and be Francophone – to manage state policy at the regional level. The central government in Yaoundé will still select Divisional Officers to govern districts. Meanwhile, the national government will retain significant control over local government resources, including the power to seize council-owned land “where national defense or public order requirements dictate”.
The bill also continues the government’s preference for establishing national committees to discuss contentious issues such as decentralisation and local finance, an approach that has led to little change over several years.
What will change?
Perhaps most significantly, the bill will establish various indirectly-elected organs with semi-administrative responsibilities. Each region will have a new bicameral Regional Assembly made up a House of Chiefs composed of 20 traditional leaders and a House of Regional Representatives composed of 70 members. The latter will be selected by municipal councils, but it is not specified how the chiefs will be chosen. The two Anglophone regions will also institute a new Regional Executive Council composed of eight members to be selected by regional councils. What powers the Regional Assembly and Regional Executive Council will have, however, remains unclear. In many cases, it is likely their responsibilities will largely be determined by laws implemented in Yaoundé.
The bill also gives mayors additional powers regarding educational and medical institutions in their municipalities, but it does not change the underlying governance structure that has allowed Yaoundé to manage the affairs of local municipalities for decades.
Continuing the war
Although the bill has been passed, the government has not yet provided a timeline for its implementation. This is significant given that it is renowned for taking an extraordinarily long time to implement initiatives. At the moment, the government is also focusing much of its attention and resources on the legislative and municipal elections scheduled for early-February.
In the meantime, it is notable that its combative military operations have continued. On New Year’s Day, for example, the military burnt down a village in the division of Lebialem. It has also been detaining large numbers of young men in urban areas of the Southwest region. In many instances, detainees have been taken to a secret detention facility in Buea and subjected to severe torture until their families pay a bribe to get them released. In his New Year’s address, President Biya reiterated a hardline message by promising that the military would carry out its duty “without weakness”, while there have been continuous deployments of military personnel to the two Anglophone regions in recent weeks.
The secessionists, who are internally extremely divided, have maintained unity in declaring the “special status” as illegitimate. They have also denounced the upcoming legislative and municipal elections and have said that they will use force to prevent them from taking place in the two English-speaking regions. They have acted upon this by burning down the homes of two parliamentarians and kidnapping more than twenty politicians of the opposition SDF party, threatening to kill them if they do not disavow their party allegiance. They also announced a planned five-day lockdown around the elections to prevent people from voting.
All of these events come as the so-called Swiss Process, aimed at resolving the conflict through dialogue, appears to have reached a stalemate. The Cameroonian government insists the “special status” initiative is sufficient to address the grievances of the Anglophone population, while secessionist leaders have not met since autumn 2019. There has been intense infighting among separatist factions, including a recent mutiny that resulted in a commander by the name of “General Divine” being killed by his own fighters. While some fighters remain adamant their struggle will lead to independence, others have given up on it entirely.
In all likelihood, this means that the two sides will continue to fight whilst wreaking havoc on civilians in the two Anglophone regions. The special status bill will do little to change this.
Source: African Arguments.Org