God the Politician

1. Birth of a Political Messiah

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Birth of a Political Messiah he news fell like a thunderbolt. ‘A new political party has just been formed. It will be launched on 20 May 1990.’ The leader of the new party was a Bamenda-based bookseller, Ni John Fru Ndi; proprietor of Ebibi bookshop along Bamenda Commercial Avenue. In palm-wine drinking houses, bars, beer parlours, markets and street corners in Bamenda, the topic was the same: the name of the new political party was the Social Democratic Front (SDF). The man in the street quickly interpreted it to mean ‘Suffer Don Finish’ in Pidgin English, to suit their dreams and aspirations of seeing the end of the Biya regime that, they were categorical, had brought economic hardship to Cameroon. To pre-empt such an eventuality, the Biya regime acting through the DO of Bamenda Central, issued an order banning the planned launch and warned all those supporting or sympathizing with such a venture against the dire consequences of continuing to do so. The order produced the reverse effect. John Fru Ndi suddenly became a household name in Cameroon and could say with greater justification than Lord Byron: ‘I woke up one morning to find myself famous’. Dear readers, I deem it necessary to caution you here that this is not just a history book. It is an account of what I saw, read in papers and watched on TV, with an analysis of the facts. To put it another way, it is a concatenation of common events with some uncommon observations on them. I therefore intend in the course of this narrative to not only digress but also to skip months, weeks and days during which nothing spectacular or noteworthy occurred. This approach has been placed in a positive light by Henry Fielding, one of my favourite English authors. Fielding thinks a good historical account should not be like a stage coach which sets out on its journey whether it is full or empty. To place the idea in a modern context, an account of past events should not behave like the buses of Guarantee Transport Agency when the company was first established in Bamenda. Whether it had passengers or not, every bus left at a particular time, most of the seats empty or occupied by ‘motor boys’ travelling for free. This was an error the T 5 company later corrected. We will also not behave like some regular newspapers which, to keep their rendezvous with readers, must print whether they have interesting stories or not. The history of the SDF is no novelty to Cameroonians, especially those already of adult age in 1990. To simply state what happened without pointing out the implications would be a near complete waste of time if not a disservice to the unsuspecting Cameroonian reader who would be constrained to purchase for the second time what is already in his/her archive or bookshelf, given that other writers have already published more quickly than me on the subject. My preoccupation here is why democracy remains a fleeting illusion seventeen years after the launch of a party that promised to bring change to Cameroon. I also intend to focus my searchlight on the Anglophone problem in a Cameroon aggravated by the ruthless system in place, and the university crisis that stemmed from the regime’s inability to handle academic complications. The excesses of Fon Doh and Baba Amadou Danpullo, two Frankenstein monsters created by the system, will also be examined. The activities of the Operational Command, a murderous squad created by the regime to subjugate the pro-opposition inhabitants of Douala, the country’s economic capital and the pretext of fighting urban crime will be given the attention deserved by that event which led to the loss of over 600 lives. Most of the victims were innocent civilians. As I hinted earlier, the prospect of the SDF’s launch raised the hopes of most Cameroonians. They saw the soon-to-be launch as a panacea to their sufferings and Fru Ndi as the long-awaited Messiah who would redeem the country from the stranglehold of a regime that had plunged Cameroon into an economic quagmire. The party leadership argued that the late Amadou Ahidjo, the previous head of state, had left behind a vibrant economy and that the country had been brought to its knees by tribalism, nepotism and the mismanagement of its vast resources. I graduated from the University of Yaoundé in 1986 with a BA in English Modern...