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97 17 Revelations Chapter 31 F or “INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM,” the gold medal for this year will surely go to LA NOUVELLE EXPRESSION.” In this regard, the newspaper is poised to equal any other, anywhere in the world. As I predicted, the entire 22 chapters of our “Book of Revelations” will come tumbling, one by one, until the very last chapter, apparently. Well, no problem. Are we not already unshockable? Our consciences have become rough, hardened and impenetrable, like the outer skin of a crocodile. La Nouvelle Expression has read for us, in a loud and clear voice, the third chapter of the book of our National Bible of Shame and Disgrace. Except that we have become quite shameless too. Every successive chapter of our Book of Revelations will be more revealing, more unbelievable, than the preceding. Here we are shouting: crise cconornique, crise economique everywhere. We have been made to tighten our belts, and taxes are being collected from impoverished citizens by sheer physical force, at gunpoint. But the high priests of the battle against the crise economique are the ones having shamelessly large helpings from the diminishing national cake, not before but at the very height of the crise. So, imagine what must have been done before the onset of the crise to cause the crise. This is a situation that the collective conscience of any epoch in any society should not be allowed to gloss over. We owe it as a bounden moral duty to ourselves and to future generations, our own progeny, to address ourselves to such a lethal virus. The question that really needs to be asked is this: “Is there any Cameroonian who, given the chance, would not sell this whole country to the devil for less than thirty pieces of silver?” Well, that is only a question. The impression one really gets is that, when all is told, it may turn out that there is scarcely anybody within the ranks of our incumbent rulers who could not sell all of us to the devil if she/he got a good offer. Or else how do we explain the complete lack of reaction, talk less of indignation, the acquiescence that borders on complicity, the strenuous efforts to hide the evidence 98 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy and the ruthless methods to suppress its leakage anywhere? Just more questions. Maybe you yourself ate Camtraco rice today. If you did, you too are far from being a patriot. I remember with horror the Lake Nyos disaster of 1986. No sooner had it occurred than some newspaper in the U.S.A. came out with the allegation that, far from being a natural disaster, it was a surreptitious test of the neutron bomb, arranged by the American C.I .A. with the complicity of certain Cameroonian authorities. Some Nigerian newspapers picked up the story. But in Cameroon, we laughed at such an incredible story as being too puerile and farfetched , too fantastic, too science-fictionic to merit even a passing thought. But should any coherent theory of explanation be ruled out for any putative event before the correct explanation has been demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt? In the case of Nyos, no such correct theory has been forthcoming, as can be seen from the serious disagreements between the various groups of white “experts” who came to investigate the disaster. We will probably never know the actual cause of the Nyos disaster. But now, with the profit of hindsight, and within the context of our unfolding Book of Revelations, the question to ask now is whether it is impossible for people, who have done the sort of things that we have come to know to have connived with diabolic foreigners to organize such a disaster for substantial material rewards? A question too many? A foolish evil thought? You be the judge. I would not assert what I don’t know. I only evoke logical possibilities. The United State of America (the world champion of democracy and liberalism) has demonstrated a very suspicious partiality in its attitude towards Cameroon, by comparison with other African countries. In places like Zaire and Kenya, the U.S. has moved very decisively and unequivocally in its support of the process of democratisation and the dismantling of the structures of dictatorship. But when it comes to Cameroon, it has been equivocation all the way. In the U.S.A. the most revered, almost sacred, thing is the Constitution. So why has the U.S...

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