Ze J. Blaise: quintessential Cameroon regime man!

Ze J. Blaise is said to have been a billing agent (“agent de facturation”) in the Cameroon Postal Services (CamPost) who, between 2011 and 2013, succeeded to embezzle some 3 billion FCFA from CamPost!

He is said to have raised false payment documents which he sent to the Central Bank (BEAC) from where chunks of the money from CamPost account were paid into accounts opened by his relatives and agents in various local banks in Cameroon. The relatives are said to have included Meva’a Ndounga Dieudonné, Oyono Oyono Timothée, Abessolo Etienne, and Wodjo Assoumou F. Moise.

We are told that apart from Meva’a Ndounga Dieudonné who is under arrest, all the other three accused are on the run. This is the information filtering to us from the Special Criminal Court in Yaounde.

The case, like many others, is a damning statement about regime people in Cameroon and the system with which the country has been governed during the last 30-some years. Indeed, Ze J. Blaise is a quintessential CPDM regime man!

While the rest of us behave like outsider fated to watch adrift, seeming incapable of making anything happen, discipline, integrity, morality, patriotism, transparency, and accountability have been thrown to the dogs, to let nepotism, clientelism, and cronyism to reign supreme. Political hacks and regime loyalists without training, experience, integrity, and morality, are regularly appointed to take charge of our destiny. That is where Ze J. Blaise is coming from.

The system of governance in Cameroon is porous, and leaves our commonwealth at the mercy of all types of people, who manipulate the system to their advantage, at their whim.

It is a system based on window dressing with bogus, ineffective control instruments like state control (Consupe), national agency for financial investigation (Anif), national anti-corruption commission (Conac), national governance program (Png), inter-ministerial committee of ethics and the fight against corruption, Audit Bench of the Supreme Court, Special Criminal Court (Tcs), and many others!

Newspapers have recently been awash with information that Paul Biya has sent some regime people to smoke out and repatriate money lodged in foreign bank accounts by regime people! And we are not being told the role of any of these numerous outfits in this new theatrical action!

It is unimaginable that an individual can so easily move 3 billion FCFA from the account of a company so successfully, and disappear from the scene before his exploits are discovered! If we consider the show the regime puts up when citizens decide to follow their files in the various ministries and institutions in Yaounde, trudging from one office to the other until they have the feeling that no comma wrongly placed can pass unnoticed, Ze’s exploits would really be considered unimaginable. But not in our Cameroon of today!

There is a plethora of Ze J. Blaises in Cameroon who have easy access to our commonwealth, and use it as and when they like. The control systems are ineffective because they are manned by fellow backscratchers, backslappers, and profiteers. Citizens like Ze J. Blaise belong both to society and to themselves. His case – like many others – challenges us to focus attention on the relation between the behaviour of the individual in society and his or her social responsibility for their actions, inactions, or compromises.

We have to look for the psychodynamic explanation for why people like him steal so much money; why their selfish considerations are so prone to trump selflessness and the general interest; why they so easily turn into monsters whose consciences are untroubled by the embezzlement of such huge sums of money.

Journalists and academics need to go beyond simple reportage to seek clarifications for these worries. The case of Ze J. Blaise brings again to the fore the fact that the explicit and implicit conventions by which people handle budgets in Cameroon are inefficient and ineffective. It brings again to the fore the bizarreness of the CPDM politics of administrative centralization and territorial unification of an absolutist state in which the centre exercises a monopoly of reality, and decrees appointments from Yaounde, based not on merit but on nepotism, clientelism and cronyism.

There is an urgent need to establish structural and systemic transparency and accountability that make it impossible for any individual or cabal to so easily violate the safety of our commonwealth. If we fail to do this, we would suffer the citizen guilt of betraying our collective responsibility for a shared enterprise by showing complicity and compromise, and acting as willing accomplices in the perpetuation of the continuing pillage of our commonwealth.

Ze J. Blaise is so obviously a window through which we can view the contours of the corruption playing field of our ruling regime. He should be properly profiled so we know where he came from, how he got to where he was, why he operated so successfully, why the documents he sent to BEAC were considered authentic, where he has escaped to, what are the concrete steps being taken to recover the 3 billion of our tax money carted away.

When we get answers to these questions, it will certainly be obvious that his fellow regime people are just staging the chair dance usually staged by nursery school children, and hoping that the rest of us will not know that Ze J. Blaise is an epitome of badly dressed disorder; that Ze is just a front man of a cabal.

When we get the answers to the questions, it will become obvious that he is an albatross just because of the proverbial act that always turns out to be one too much – the last straw, the last drop, or the act after the 99th!

Ze J. Blaise is both an issue that needs to be discussed and a problem that needs to be solved. The CPDM regime needs to know that we are not just here to consume the bounty of today; we need to invest for a much greater one tomorrow.

The Ze J. Blaises may probably suffer individual guilt, but we will suffer greater citizen guilt if we continue to fail to pay our debt to a challenging present that impels us towards a future befitting for the generation of the second decade of the 21st century and beyond. We cannot continue to pretend that our teaming youths can prepare for that future by watching these sickening activities of their grandparents on the stage!