Book Review: Le Choix de l’Action

My review of Marafa Hamidou Yaya’s book is two-pronged. It is a review of both the text and the context of a book written by someone whose role in developing the anachronism of Cameroon’s political structuralism and in what I call extremist dehomogenisation of Cameroon’s political landscape is not only well known, but well documented.

Until an English translation of this book sees the light of day, a review like this may be the only opportunity for most Anglophones to understand what Marafa’s book is all about. Of course, Marafa is not just anyone. He played a key role in managing the State’s architecture during a crucial part of our history and wants to make us believe that he deserves a chance to comeback someday to the helm of that architecture.

Marafa’s approach in this book is curious. He opens by quoting Victor Hugo as if he needed a western intellectual compass to give him direction in his local political combat a la Africaine. You would wonder; why Victor Hugo? Victor Hugo was a well-known writer of the romantic era – which originated in Europe.

This era was evidenced by a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalisation of nature.

Marafa has been part of the fulcrum of Biya’s political apparatus and an unapologetic aristocrat in the Biya regime, a regime whose political norms and modus operandi make me reminisce about the later part of that same 18th century. So, you can argue that Marafa’s repeated use of Victor Hugo is both ill-informed and unintelligible. Victor Hugo states that “…I have daylight before me and the night behind me … I have broken the barrier”. What gives Marafa the audacity of certainty that the night is behind and that the barrier has been broken? What barrier?

Pages 89-115 of ‘Le Choix de l’Action’ lists data on the 271 political parties that were approved by MINAT before December 9, 2011. Most of these parties were created and approved under Marafa.

The comeback of multi-party politics in the 1990s marked an era of rising hope because it provided an opportunity for what an American renowned sociologist (Hennessy) once described as the “need for biased pluralism.”

But under Marafa, the number of political parties increased in geometric progression due to less stringent rules arguably meant to render the political landscape so chaotic that the regime would be seen as the only source of sensible and coordinated action.

This massive approval based on fluid rules resulted in extremist dehomogenisation of the political landscape, laid bare the ingredients for chaos and opened the floodgates for rising despair. Marafa failed to deal with a key issue in Cameroon’s ethnocracy i.e. the way political parties are financed and how sustainable and equitable financing of political parties could be achieved in order for our democratic credentials to improve.

On the positive side, ‘Le Choix de l’Action’ gives us very useful data on the role and activities of the Ministry of Territorial Administration for over a decade. This is great service offered by Marafa to his Cameroonian compatriots. I find this data both informative and transformative.

Given the well-known information-hoarding credentials of the Biya regime, Marafa’s book plays an important role in providing us with useful data and anecdotes that would not be accessible to ordinary Cameroonians like me, ceteris paribus.

However, Cameroon’s youths will not be hoodwinked. If Marafa understands this, he may be able to refocus his energy outside epistolary forms like this and maybe help prepare the younger generation for the future. He needs to understand that he is part of the past, not the future. This is not rocket science. Understanding this should be easier than understanding the Albatros dossier.

On page 11 of his book, he emphasises on the need to take responsibility for the past in order to construct the future. However, he manages with varying degrees of success to avoid taking responsibility for his past mistakes in the apparatus he manned or co-manned – if you please.

So, even though it can be argued that this book is extremely useful for those of us who engage in the construction of our country’s future, the writer does not have a role as enviable as that of his book. His book is for the future, but, alas, he remains a signpost of the past.