More Anglophones heading to Kondengui?

A sitting Anglophone minister and a former government delegate to the Limbe city council could be the next high-profile tenants of Kondengui prison

The number of Anglophones to be swept by the whirlwind of the fight against corruption codenamed “Operation Sparrow hawk” is likely to increase in the weeks or months ahead, if reports coming from the Special Criminal Tribunal in Yaounde are anything to go by.

After the arrest and imprisonment of the former general manager of Chantier Naval, Zaccheus Forjindam, and former Prime Minister, Thomas Ephraim Inoni, both of whom are now licking their wounds in the New Bell and Kondengui central prisons respectively, that of a sitting minister and a former government delegate may follow suit.

The Median has been informed that Laurent Esso, the minister of Justice, has already been informed of charges brought against Paul Atanga Nji, minister of special duties at the Presidency of the Republic, and which has to do with the alleged mismanagement of funds at the defunct Postal Savings Bank (Cheques Postaux) in Yaounde.

In the same vein, Lifanda Samuel Ebiama, former government delegate to the Limbe urban council may also answer legal questions concerning his alleged embezzlement of funds while he was serving as government delegate. Both case files, we were informed by sources at the court, are already lying on the table of the procureur general of the Special Criminal Tribunal, Emile Zépherin Nsoga.

They are part of 20 preliminary enquiries received by the court since January 2013 but which are still to be opened by the said court. Meantime, we were further told that 53 other enquiries received on this date have long been opened but investigations are ongoing. Our sources did not however reveal exactly when investigations on the 20 earlier mentioned files will begin.

The other personalities concerned with these preliminary enquiries are mostly former ministers and general managers of state corporations as well as sitting mayors and government delegates, all of them Francophones.

Some of them are Clobert Tchatat, former minister of Agriculture; Anong Adibimé, former minister of State Property and Land Tenure, now senator; Gervais Mendo Ze, former GM of CRTV; Iya Mohamed, former FECAFOOT president now in detention at the Kondengui maximum security prison; Jean Baptiste Nguini Effa, former GM of SCDP now in detention at the New Bell central prison; Emmanuel Ngollo Ngama, the former government delegate of Nkongsamba; André Noël Essiane, the sitting mayor of Sangmelima; Samson Ndongo Ela, the sitting mayor of Ma’an; just to mention these.

It should be recalled that the Special Criminal Tribunal that was created in 2012 handles only embezzlement cases that have to do with sums ranging from 50 million FCFA and above.