Bars - The Challenge of Enforcing the Law

Cameroon, many say, is known worldwide as a haven for beer. In effect, a major indicator that Cameroonians cherish beer just like babies love breast milk is seen in the number of bars juxtaposed along key streets in most big towns and cities of the country.

As retail outlets for a multitude of beer brands produced by a thriving brewery industry, bars have also today become known as breeding grounds for gangsters and promoters of organised crime. In most towns, streets and junctions have been named after bars. Unofficial street names such as "Rue de la joie," "Carrefour de la joie," "Carrefour beaucoup de bars," have gained popular acceptance and notoriety in recent years.

Given the high demand for drinking spots, bar tenders have devised all sorts of ways to violate provisions of the November 9, 1990 decree regulating the bar sector and the November 22, 1993 decree on its implementation, to create a world of enjoyment spots that includes not only street-side beer drinking, but also loud music, brawls, gambling, prostitution, drunkenness and crime. Like last year, administrative and local authorities decided this year to bring bar owners to order. In Mfoundi Division of the Centre Region last March, the Senior Divisional Officer, Jean Claude Tsila, ordered his Divisional Officers to seal bars violating certain provisions of the law. In the crusade, over 31 bars were closed down in popular neighbourhoods such as Kondengui, Ekounou, Ekie, Biyem-Assi and Essos.

Reasons for the closure included the non-respect of closing hours, malpractices by on-licences and off-licences, loud music, transformation into cabarets or bar-dancings, and poor localisation of the businesses.

Furthermore, authorities say most of the bars have love-making rooms and so used condoms litter them every morning to the dismay of neighbours whose children get acquainted early to immorality, prostitution, drugs and drunkenness.

In the city of Douala, where over a hundred bars were closed around the University of Douala in May 2012, authorities blamed their presence for luring young students away from lectures into alcohol, prostitution and drugs. However, not long after the sealing, most of these bars were seen functioning again with the same deviant attitudes for which they were accused of. Such repeated yearly scenarios raise so many questions. What explains such a persistent recourse to taking beer by so many people? Why do bartenders continue despite the existence of regulation? How efficient could authorities be in ensuring compliance to the laws in force?

The argument that the brewery industry provides jobs and revenue to the State as well as solace to Cameroonians in search of leisure, cannot stand strong before the need to curb urban disorder and moral decadence promoted by bars. Indifference could not be the best answer to the proliferation of enjoyment streets and major junctions dedicated to the consumption of "booze." The inability of authorities to put a permanent end to disorder in the bar sector only points to the conclusion that, "the law itself has been put in the beer bottle" by the brewery industry through bartenders to let Cameroonians to drink irresponsibly.

The widespread nature of the bar phenomenon with most major cities across the country being affected on a daily basis has let Cameroon Tribune to look into the issue.