Letter from Buea to Yaoundé

Dear Ngwa,

I am guilty as charged in your accusation of staying incommunicado. But that doesn’t exculpate you. You are guilty as guilty as I am. Both of us have fallen short of the glory of God. But that is that for now.

Since you know that development follows roads, you people have decided to underdeveloped the two Anglophone regions by not giving them roads. I am practically babysitting since Enanga followed he brothers wife to the erstwhile Nkambe Division, the first to be created after the Bamenda Division of yore.

The brother has said driving on the road from Nkambe to Kumbo is tantamount to scrapping his car which is less than a year old. The gullies are as big and deep as graves.

And this is a road that as far back as the 1960s, it used to take barely two and half hours from Nkambe to Bamenda - a distance mere 170km. Nowadays it takes as much as seven to eight hours to cover that distance, six of the hours wasted on the Kumbo – Nkambe stretch which is just 70km long.

Ngwa, how are you doing about Christmas? There is no money and you know how Buea is expensive. For instance, for a distance like from Commercial Avenue Bamenda to Bambili commuters pay FCFA 300, and the same distance from Buea to Victoria (Limbe) we pay FCFA 1,000. Sachet whisky which sells in Bamenda at FCFA 100 sells in Buea at FCFA 150. That is how it is with many goods and services.

The Buea Central Market issue here remains in a stalemate. I hear the contract has been handed over to a different contractor. The young man who acted as a copy-cat of Mothercare Nigeria to give him the clout to win the contract has proverbially broken his nose against a stonewall.

What is the paramount ruler of the Bafaws up to? Where has he been all this while? Is the Yaounde regime not ready to silence the nonagenarian? How can he come out to state that there is an Anglophone problem when higher-ups in the regime like PM Yang don’t admit that there is?

By the way, I hear that lawyers are again girding their loins to meet in Kumba and follow up their memo on the case of the Anglo-Saxon educational, legal and cultural legacy which undergoing a systematic emasculation. I cannot fail to be there, in person. Won’t you be there to hear and see them read another riot act? Always try to be part of history, Ngwa. If you make up your mind, please tell me so that we will meet there.

Say hi to Manka’a and the children

Mbella