God the Politician

6. Sacrificial Lambs and Wolves

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Sacrificial Lambs and Wolves he long-awaited verdict came at 11 am on 23 October 1992. Our school was on break and I took advantage of this to go downtown and follow the Supreme Court’s pronouncement on a TV set in one of the popular drinking spots along Bamenda’s main market. Commercial Avenue was practically deserted except for a few taxicabs. Most of the town’s inhabitants were at home following events on TV or in the bars like myself. The Supreme Court president, Alexis Dipanda, started by quoting the relevant texts empowering his institution to declare the results and proceeded to give details of the irregularities that characterized the election exercise. Despite the fact that CRTV had prepared the minds of the public for Biya’s victory, opposition leaders and their supporters expected either a pronouncement that the results had been cancelled or that somebody apart from Biya had won. When the pronouncement finally came that Biya had won, it seemed to SDF supporters that the world had come to an end. I was in a perplexed mood by the time I left that drinking spot. I arrived to find the whole school in total disarray. I was so dejected I didn’t have the least inclination to teach. A few teachers who had like myself just returned from break, pretended that what had just happened concerned only politicians and should not affect their lessons. They were sadly mistaken. The students had learnt of the Supreme Court’s verdict and, being convinced that they had no future under the Biya regime, concluded that learning was no longer important. As they rose from their benches and started leaving, some of the teachers attempted to prevent them. It was like trying to stop a torrent with a finger. The students shoved the teachers aside and ran out of the classrooms. Some of them jumped out through the windows. The principal, Renchi Abraham, was equally helpless and had to close the school for the day. I left the school campus like many of my other colleagues and started trekking home using the back entrance to the school. The first indication that trouble had begun was a scream from T 46 one of the compounds close to the gate. On looking in the direction from which the noise had come, I saw a fire and a thick cloud of smoke that was polluting the atmosphere. I learnt from one of the onlookers that a mob of opposition supporters had dragged out the furniture of a Beti clansman who was a tenant in that house and set them on fire. They were, however, too humane to lynch them. The same concern for human life seemed to influence the mob that set on fire the house of Mrs Regina Mundi, a member of the ruling CPDM central committee. Albert Cho Ngafor, a relation of Simon Achidi Achu, the then prime minister, was not so fortunate. Ngafor was the proprietor of NACHO College, the biggest institution in Anglophone Cameroon with a student enrolment of over five thousand students. Ngafor attracted the wrath of the mob by emerging from his office with a pistol, which was actually intended more for intimidation than for use. Un fortunately, Ngafor was yet to be fully acquainted with the notion that crime is always a step ahead of criminology and so was not prepared for what happened next .According to eyewitnesses, some of the students who had scores to settle with him had taken advantage of his preoccupation with the crowd and walked on tiptoe to a position where neither Ngafor nor anybody sympathetic to him could see them. From their vantage point, they leaped, grabbed his waist and wrested the pistol from his hands. The next moment, Ngafor was sprawled on the ground and, being a giant of a man with a huge stomach, cut a truly comic figure. They practically did high jump using his belly, which served both as takeoff and landing point. One of the students who begrudged him for defrauding him of a reasonable amount of money with the pretext that it was for school fees behaved as if Ngafor had swallowed the money instead of spending it. ‘That money must come out,’ the aggrieved student shouted as he trampled on the defeated college proprietor. Ngafor’s life was spared only because the majority of those present argued that as he had killed nobody, he didn’t deserve the supreme punishment. His...