Letter From Buea to Yaounde

Dear Mbella,

When I did not hear from you last week, I was afraid that you might have voted with your feet to shirk the responsibility of righting the wrongs in this triangle. I heaved a sigh of relief when I was told that you were in a patriotic globe-trotting mission.

It does not make it any news as to who gets to the Kondengui dormitory. But, we all noticed the short arm of the law of the scammer who tried to abscond justice last week. He felt short of using Bracton’s maxim viz “that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity”. But, the POSTCAM affair was a dangerous logjam where a bunch of racketeers simply vamoosed with the people’s savings.

If you will, the issue was not just about bad loans. It was a racket of financial bandits lending themselves huge sums of money at the expense of the common good. What happened in Abakwa was the total gibberish of a flawed poll.

The scheming, the blackmail and the backstabbing made nonsense of the sanctity of the church. Was all the noisy scramble a bid to triumph as God’s servant or his enemy? The campaigns were a garbage heap that betrayed an agonising triumph of spiritual emptiness and moral elasticity in the land. The new shepherd will be a patched work of spiritual fraud.

Cameroon is a wasteland that needs ceaseless prayers for the filth to be completely out. The rented jesters are here to fill their pockets and hand-clap everything into adoption. Design a bill that will enable oga quata quata to be a cannibal and before you blink the whole thing would sail to adoption.

And what about the opposition in the house? There is no opposition there; rather it is a gombo fraternity, where everybody is in a mad rush to pilfer the people’s money and eat fat.

Let’s ward off the cynicism in us and learn to apportion blame where it is due. Etoudi cannot take the censure for every odd thing is happening in this country alone. Is it Etoudi that asked that gentleman in suit to pull out his weapon of mass destruction and emptied his bladder right in front of our office?

Even if Etoudi has the ambition to beat Methuselah’s record of existence, he is neither omnipresent nor omniscient. I take great exception to those who blame him even for the filth that is piling up in one’s bedroom. He cannot come in to clean your bedroom for you.

By the way, must he be the one to tell your representatives to vote a realistic budget? What explains the fact that the chopping budget is always more than the investment budget? You see the business is all about validating the blank cheque for those white collar thieves to feed fat from the people’s wallet. The job of the representatives is very enjoyable, play to the gallery, sleep, clap and take FCFA 1.5 million.

It’s a shame because we have all shown that our unity as a people, our love for this country and our hope for a great future are in the doldrums. So, Cameroon is a country that has made history many times for the wrong reasons.

It’s a country where everyone seems to think and reason with his stomach. The wide gap between the rich and the poor continue to yawn, Mbella. Don’t mention the painstaking process of land acquisition. It is a nightmare for the poor and the powerless. Paying for land does not guarantee ownership of it. It is merely the beginning of a battle that one could lose after spending huge sums of money.

That’s why the land merchants of Fako can auction ancestral land without blinking. Yet the poor, the powerless who are the real owners are marginalised in the throbbing arena of land business. Lets name and shame the greedy land grabbing monster at Mbaicham, otherwise the people’s land will go.

Don’t expose me to the wolves, bye for now.

Yours Ngwa