Background of Ruin XIX: False Patriots Under The Aegis Of Biya

The gradual subjection of the being of Cameroon’s Parliament has become a seriously ambiguous and multi-layered reality, characterised by multiple rifts, tensions and contradictions.

As I speak to you right now, Paul Biya seems to have transformed the legislative body into a meadow full of flowers, where the so called honourable men can pick their share, especially those with extra-philosophical allegiances.

And now, decisions reached at sessions are highly questionable; placing the country’s life and the crucial implementation of policies into questionableness. One cannot be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take the side of the suffering, the hoi polloi, because, neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Biya’s epoch and history of being President of Cameroon for 32 years, gathered toward a single sense, has seen the intensifying oblivion of progress and his fixation in power, in a single sense again, has rendered him insensitive almost always to the heterogeneity of the peoples of our country. For all these years, leadership has become a rumour of promise moods, fluctuated between the extremes of doomsday despair and the euphoria of new beginnings wished by many when nominal ministerial changes are made.

Under the aegis of Paul Biya, there has been no reform of life, and all along we have had false bombast, ideological self-deception, a load of hocus-pocus declarations, indiscipline in thinking and execution of policies certainly regarded as hidden and lost in the tangle of prejudices, grand words and ideological constructs.

Today, the only change we expect as humble Cameroonians is a total break-away from the past, we expect new people who will enter the system in newness and submerge the disenchanted Cameroon into the twilight of deliberate re-enchantment. It is my conviction that a reversal can take place only when thinking itself is transformed rigorously; yes, only by a thinking which has a divine origin and calling. We wait for that day when the morning breezes will bring real changes and when we shall no longer see the unspoken things that have, for long, remained veiled.

Our leader seems to have reached an ambivalent position defending some increasingly idiosyncratic lost ‘essence’ of national unity against what it is in reality from especially this imponderable time. Many who had viewed Biya’s coming to power in 1982 as the chance of a genuine national renewal, one that could lead Cameroon away from the path of nihilism and self-destruction, have been swiftly betrayed.

Looking back on this supposed betrayal, many blame not only Biya, but all of us Cameroonians for not having tried other men in sufficient numbers to direct and shape events here, and for allowing unpatriotic men and thieves to lead us; for not giving the chance to a genuine soul who can work our country out of the shadows of a nihilistic modernity into a new dispensation of being that seeks the common good. We all are guilty and the new version of atomistic individualism of modern life that has come into Cameroon and its solitude and individualistic spirit will continue to alienate us further and further from a better structuring of human existence which is ‘political’ in a deeper sense and can make for an essential kind of change.

And as if it does not rain but pours, Cameroon’s Constitution and Penal Code are nearly dead, not just because the judges will no longer enforce them, but even more because our lawyers will not even fight for them. The “political parties” in minute ways have been fighting for them, but worst still; our news media have also been very passive. If one looks at Cameroon in depth, one can see there has been a widespread moral collapse in the legal and political structures. This means that Cameroon’s legal system has become largely a tool of Government terror and of bribery for the rich and the powerful. It is an endlessly devious manipulation of words and phrases to get the desired result, devious falsehood and lies backed by naked power emanate everywhere from the Courts, Parliament, Star-Building and the so called Unity Palace.

For a long while, we have been seeing the assumption of false appearances of virtue or goodness, with a dissimulation of the real characters or proclivities of those who can pay for political arrangements. Many times in Cameroon, allegations have emerged of Parliamentarians and Mayors who betray their people, steal their money, engage in malpractice and help out only their close relatives.

Who shall come to reignite the spirit of a nation grown cold and whose fence has been eaten up by termites? The politics of Paul Biya, in short, blends a familiar mixture of infatuation of power with an awareness of arrogance. It has become clear that our Ministers and MPs live out their hedonistic fantasies, unrestrained by our laws and moral codes. Politicians, to whom we give our hearts — such as Biya, Tchiroma Bakary, Bello Bouba and others have only been raping our economy and operating above our laws.

It has become part of politicking for MPs and Mayors during campaigns to soften the people’s hearts with alcohol. I must say here that it is very easy to forgive a blind person, than one who willfully closes his eyes and is misled. And simply put, Biya’s antics and polemics have gone on as he has been playing with words or seduced by French grammar to make audacious generalisations and punctuated administrative anomalies that take the form of promises.

There are great fears of a hidden agenda behind the recent law on terrorism with its stress and threats, ranging from time and friction to decomposition meant to give our leader a measure of durability.

But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human life in our country, many Cameroonians have remained unwavering believers in patriotism. The roads of false patriotism are well travelled by many men here and their markers are well seen — the mesmerising attraction of speech, miserliness, an overflow of more words than action, with an ideational obsession and the after glow of election campaigns. Authentic patriotism takes its own course, through unfamiliar territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It is difficult to define, it eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically confused. But I know patriotism exists though I have not seen it here in Cameroon.

As to the future of Cameroon, I can only say, like the weather forecaster who announces; “Tomorrow will be a beautiful day if it does not rain.” Cameroon can emerge before too long, even with its potentially wonderful enlargements still being imagined by its leaders, as a nation of solidarity, progress and law. These great changes can come about, notwithstanding the fact that there are about as many trends operating toward opposite outcomes: a hardening of discrimination; a fall to the least common denominator of good initiatives and a false polarisation and decentralisation of power.