Fame Ndongo and co, don’t dare Anglophones

Ordinarily, Jacques Fame Ndongo, Minister of Higher Education cuts the picture of an urbane, erudite and level headed intellectual who has spent most of his adult life fighting to instill a culture of love for excellence in Cameroon’s higher education milieu.

He has been functioning as ideologue of the Biya regime since the exit of earlier masters like Francois Sengat Kuo and Joseph Owona.

Apart from his ministerial pedestal, he is also, head of communication in the Central Committee of the Cameroon Peoples Democratic Movement, CPDM, and shadow head of Communication at the Presidency of the Republic.

His command of the French language is very alluring, just like his argumentation in support for his master Paul Biya. However, like his master, he typifies dyed-in- the wool Anglophobe and exhibits this invidious trait with no qualms with regard to its repercussions on the national arena.

A telling example of his recklessness in approach to governance is epitomized in the now omnipresent quest to enfeeble Anglophone education at the tertiary level. Despite strident calls from Anglophone members of the Higher Education Teachers Trade Union, SYNES, and other concerned citizens admonishing him against interfering with the status quo of courses in state universities that have a bearing on the bicultural nature of Cameroon, especially Common Law, he is seemingly on a collision course with the wrath of Anglophone resilience that has been proven several times before now.

His first salvo on this issue sometime in May, 2015 seemed to have been a test akin to the proverbial man who wanted to cross a bridge with wood crossings that had taken severe battering from prolonged exposure to wear and tear, ensuing from weather vicissitudes.

There would be only two possibilities. Either the planks support his weight or they give way and he falls into a dangerous river infested with crocodiles.

In our case, Fame Ndongo has stepped on rotten plank but there is no way for him to turn back. Prodded by an inYated ego, he seems to be daring the Anglophone resolve to fight to the finish.

One can easily understand his current predicament of being between the anvil and the hammer; anvil here, being Anglophones who are primed to ensure that whatever he has up his harmonization sleeves dries up in the drawers of his office, and hammer as represented by his master, Paul Biya, who has, willy-nilly, ascribed to him the ungodly role of hatchet man in the lingering ploy to annihilate the Anglophone component of Cameroon.

The desirability or otherwise of such a reprehensible enterprise is not what is at issue here. Rather, it is already assumed that by his intellectual clout, he is supposed to be au fait with existing statutes that include the country’s constitution, and educational orientation laws of 1998 and 2001.

However, because of arrogance emanating from illusions of grandeur, Fame Ndongo, persists on engaging in a senseless tug of war with Anglophones.

A cursory look at the reforms being propagated reveals a manifest subterranean move to whittle down and eventually phase-out Common Law education and practice in Cameroon.

By proposing that Common law courses be taught only at the Masters degree level, Fame Ndongo and his ilk are unabashedly exposing their disdain for everything Anglophone, even as we shamelessly celebrate national unity annually on May 20.

Law is the soul of every society. In our case, Common law has the advantage of bringing up rounded citizens who are aware of the relationships that govern their existence in a given polity.

This means that the state exists to acquit itself of bounden responsibilities to citizens who have willfully surrendered their commonwealth to the state in exchange of protection.

It also envisions that for such citizens to be deprived of their freedoms there must be incontrovertible and uncontroverted evidence of guilt. In short, it is adversarial, requiring the prosecution to prove its case.

Te beauty of this is that it is the antithesis of the precepts of Civil Law that operates in Francophone Cameroon.

Civil law is inquisitorial and predicates proof of innocence on the accused. By this token, several innocent citizens are sent to jail at the whims of administrators and ill-willed law enforcement agents.

Fame Ndongo has stepped on rotten plank but there is no way for him to turn back. Prodded by an inflated ego, he seems to be daring the Anglophone resolve to fight to the finish.

One can easily understand his current predicament of being between the anvil and the hammer; anvil here, being Anglophones who are primed to ensure that whatever he has up his harmonization sleeves dries up in the drawers of his office

That is the kind of Cameroon Fame Ndongo and Paul Biya want to bequeath to posterity. Nevertheless, their shenanigans will only go as far as Anglophones permit them. History is on the side of Anglophones that each time they have made up their minds that enough is enough; Government has always ended up capitulating.

This was on the podium during the GCE crisis in 1985 when water cannons and tear gas failed woefully, to deter the Anglophone resolve. At the end of the slugfest, Georges Ngango lost his position as Education Minister disgracefully, while the Angolphones have had their way to this day.

Indeed, the founding and launching of the Social Democratic Front SDF, party amid arrest and incarceration of Yondo Black and others, intimidation by security forces and threats to imprison its promoters did not stop Ni John Fru Ndi and other stalwarts from the unprecedented launching of the SDF on May 26, 1990.

Be that as it may, do we have to be reckless to the point where confrontation becomes inevitable?

Certainly, not! Issues bearing on Anglophone marginalization have been on the national agenda since Ahmadou Ahidjo foisted a French-inspired referendum on Cameroon. When we were to unite with our brothers of East Cameroon, we were the only ones who voted.

Although the plebiscite result showed majority on the side of those who chose to join their brothers, no fewer than 97, 000 people out of a population of about 250,000 at the time were against the union.

By 1972, the number would have certainly increased tremendously to warrant a change in outcome, had the opportunity been given for Anglophones to solely, decide their fate. However, that was not done.

As if that were not enough provocation, Paul Biya, wiped out the Anglophone component of Cameroon in 1984 when he unilaterally changed the name of the country from ‘United Republic of Cameroon’ to ‘Republic of Cameroon’.

Since then, it has been systematic plundering of resources from Anglophone Cameroon, particularly the Southwest Region with nothing to show as Government investment in the Region that provides no less than 60 percent of the nation’s wealth.

In spite of these, we will still insist on the force of argument and not the argument of force. We know of the mindset of Fame Ndongo and his ilk. After failing to foment trouble by fanning embers of division at the national level, he has now resorted to orchestrating conflict within higher education circles. There is always a limit to how much excess a person or system can endure.

Even the worst coward will fight back when faced with a life and death circumstance and, sometimes it is just when the feel-good appeal is highest that the least expected happens. Remember the Soviet Union, Eretria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

Let us face Boko Haram and other alien afflictions like incursion by renegades from the Central African Republic and veer off avoidable stabs from self-inflicted irredentism that may lead to protracted fratricidal war.