Insubordination by gov’t officials: Time for President Biya to step in

President Biya: Will he step in?

Wikipedia defines insubordination as the act of willfully disobeying one’s superior. Refusing to perform an action that is unethical or illegal is not insubordination; neither is refusing to perform an action that is not within the scope of authority of the person issuing the order.

Insubordination is generally a punishable offense in hierarchical organizations which depend on people lower in the chain of command doing what they are expected to do. Recent happenings within government cycles have shown that when officials mislead selves about the limits of their powers, there is bound to be insubornation and disrespect of hierarchy.

The manner at which some Cameroon government officials have gone wild needs some special attention from the head of state. It is very imperative for President Paul Biya to wage in because at least for some of these senseless officials to have clear-cut ideas about which branch of government does what, how the powers counterbalances one another and why they are supposed to respect hierarchy.

We have observed that of late some public officials have exhibited behaviors and exercised powers that no dutiful acolyte of “Schoolhouse Rock!” would recognize. Even though pessimists are of the opinion that the Biya regime is suffocating from serious “identity crisis”; at the level of The Eye we believe that it would be timely for President Biya to put an end to this notion whereby every official thinks he/she is independent and or autonomous.

This stupid notion has ignited series of delusions, or perhaps misunderstandings, about who’s actually responsible for what.

Some Ministers and Director Generals seem to believe they are mathematicians, capable of reversing the rules of arithmetic in hierarchy.

Many of them who have been using similarly magical arithmetic for a while now like Ama Tutu Muna, the Minister of Arts and Culture who ignored the Prime Minister’s instructions to create SOCACIM, Meva’a Meboutou who has made himself a demi-god above senate executive, Prof. Edukat Tafah of the University of Bamenda who thinks Fame Jacque Ndongo instructions cannot be respected to admit students on the waiting list at HiTL, Sani Tanimou of Elecam who sees himself as running an independent body at Elections Cameroon, The other day it was the Minister of Agriculture and the Prime Minister, and somedays ago, It was Senate President and House Speaker (on who is the second in command) etc etc.

In fact, if the head of state cannot step in to put an end to this cacophony, the time is also at hand for the Yang Philemon to create a school attached to the Linguistic Centres of the Prime Ministry to dish out lessons to some of these public officials and walk them through what their legally defined duties and responsibilities, and boundaries to those duties and responsibilities are.

In some countries, showing poor discipline and gross insubordination, or turning back on a boss is considered a rebellion, even disloyalty and worthy of the most rigorous punishments, up to and including jail or worse. There is therefore the need for some order to reign within government cycles to avoid such public drama.