Imperialistic Politics in Cameroun: Resistance and the Inception of the Restoration of the Statehood of Southern Cameroons: Resistance and the Inception of the Restoration of the Statehood of Southern Cameroons

Chapter Eight - How the Federation was Overthrown

87 Chapter Eight How the Federation was Overthrown In 1968 Ahidjo had claimed and assumed a power to amend the ‘Federal Constitution’ by decree and to appoint the Prime Ministers and ministers of the federated states when and how he saw fit.184 In January that year he arbitrarily replaced A.N. Jua with S.T. Muna as Prime Minister of the Southern Cameroons. In March 1970 he arbitrarily sacked Vice President Foncha who had been elected with him on the same ticket in 1965. He replaced Foncha with Muna as Vice President of the Federation. Then he issued a decree amending the constitution yet again. The amendment permitted Muna to combine the two offices of Federal Vice President and state Prime Minister. The physical office of Vice President was located in Yaoundé and that of Prime Minister in Buea. This arrangement required of Muna to be constantly commuting between the two capitals, a distance of some 350 kilometres, which he covered by air. The result was that he was, according to critics, not very effective either as Vice President or as Prime Minister. That was a contributory factor to his unpopularity in the Southern Cameroons. Moreover, uniting both offices in one person, that person being a citizen of the Southern Cameroons, was a strategy meant to set more centripedal forces in motion: Muna would push the Southern Cameroons more and more into the embrace of Cameroun Republic. This did not endear him to the people of the Soputhern Cameroons. Again, uniting both offices in one person, a citizen of the Southern Cameroons, was also a strategy designed to silence complaints in the Southern Cameroons about the Vice Presidency being a mere sinecure. The Prime Minister/Vice President would be primarily occupied with the affairs of the Southern Cameroons and would not complain about lack of work and want of powers as Vice President. This strategy was all the more obvious as only five years previously Ahidjo had issued a decree amending the constitution by providing that those two offices could not be held by one and the same individual. The constitution had become Ahidjo’s toy to play with. He amended it almost on a yearly basis to suit his every whim and caprice. Ahidjo made his next move. He decided to purge from the federal government, from the Southern Cameroons government, and from the federal House of Assembly those Southern Cameroons citizens who were independent-minded and who enjoyed overwhelming support in the Southern Cameroons. Ahidjo perceived them as likely to stand in the way of his annexation agenda. After Foncha was sacked as Vice President in 1970, 184 In dictatorially assuming that power, Ahidjo made the muddled argument that the system in Cameroon being federal and not confederal the prime ministers of the component states had to be presidential appointees. See L’Effort Camerounais, No. 712 of 26 October 1969, p. 1. 88 Fonlon was dropped as Minister in 1971. Nzo Ekhah-Nghaky was also dropped.185 Rumours of secession and of the end of the Cameroon federation were quite rife from 1966-1971. They were often dismissed as false, as mere sensationalism. In 1969 a journalist directly asked Ahidjo about the future of the Cameroon Federation. Ahidjo was characteristically evasive. Still, he succeeded in giving the impression that federalism, albeit a centralist one, was alive and safe in Cameroon: “[W]e have a strong centralized federation ... I repeat, national unity does not necessarily mean that you must have a unitary state. There are examples of very solid unity in Federal States or even Confederations.”186 Well before the inception of the informal Federal on 1 October 1961, Ahidjo had expressed similar sentiments, ridiculing the ignorance of some Camerounese critics who claimed that a federal state is not based on true unity. In a spirited defence of a federal state (strange, in view of his tyrannous scrapping of the Cameroon federation ten years later) Ahidjo said on that occasion: “Vous savez, que lors de nos conversations antérieures avec les représentants du parti gouvernemental du Cameroun méridional, nous avions arrêté de commun accord les grandes lignes d’une réunification qui s’effectuarait sous une forme fédérale adaptée aux conditions particulières de nos territoires. Certains de nos compatriots, soit par ignorance, soit souvent avec le dessein de troubler les esprits avancent qu’un Etat fédéral ne repose pas sur une vraie unité. Ceux-la ignorent, ou feignent d...