Snapshots: An X-ray of Cameroon�s Democracy, Governance and Unification

17. Epitaph for Ebssiy

61 17 Epitaph for Ebssiy Monday, October 12, 1998 Here lies Ebssiy Ngum who stood for the right. A heroic chronicler, he was let down in the prime of life by friends and foes and kith and kin alike The above epitaph pales against one proclaimed by the deceased news anchor and ace commentator, Ebssiy Ngum, sometimes In June 1986 to mark the death of the Sunday English- language news commentary programme, Cameroon Report, over the national radio. When Ebssiy, the coordinator of Cameroon Report, solemnly, announced the mischievous banning of the programme through the agency is bound to persist hardly did he realize at the time that he had sparked the fuse of the political time bomb that finally exploded in the fiery circumstances surrounding the pro-democracy activism and the restoration of multipartism at the beginning of this decade. For historical record and the sake of posterity, it is most timely to reconstruct events that constitute what I now refer to as the Monkey File. The June 1986 budgetary session of parliament had just got off the ground when the Honourable Deputy of Ndian, Mr. Lobe Nwalipenja, during the Information Minister’s defence of his annual budget, asked the Minister why he thought parliament should approve allocations for a department whose journalists had been attacking public officials and parliamentarians. In a fit of embarrassment and in a bid to please the National Assembly, the Information Minister hastily issued informal instructions which filtered down the `hierarchy and were finally interpreted to mean the death of Cameroon Report. A roughly scribbled service note in the newsroom merely announced the suspension of the programme, but no one was fooled. The programme had been spiked to death and 62 despite its resuscitation and re-baptisms, it has not been and can hardly be the same again. The background to this chicanery is politically instructive. In a bid to give a semblance of open democracy, President Paul Biya, Chairman of the one and only CPDM party, introduced the idea of at least two contestants for the party section elections. Mr. Nwalipenja who, like his counterparts throughout the nation had been used to being elected by unanimous acclamation, was floored by a political unknown in his Ndian constituency. Instead of taking his humiliation in stride, the Honourable gentleman decided to take it out on the media, the Cameroon Report team in particular, as if he had expected them to announce a victory in his favour. This was a gentleman who had been denounced by his constituency for his ineptitude and hopeless record of political husbandry, who decided to take revenge on the media instead of learning from his political errors. One Saturday in the newsroom, the Cameroon Report team had assembled with all enthusiasm to tailor and package the Sunday morning programme when they learned, to their utter shock and dismay of the suspension of the programme. “We shall not take this lying down!!” Everyone was indignant and in an emergency meeting it was resolved that since Cameroon Report had been suspended, we were going to pursue our pro-democracy struggle through the revival of daily news talks at the tail end of the evening newscast. Each member of the team either choose or was assigned a topic in an allencompassing democracy crusade with the conviction that President Biya was indeed serious about opening up the suffocating political atmosphere. That done, the last point was who will bell the cat? The crusade was to start the following Monday and it was agreed that the head of the English- language news desk, George Tanni, was to sound the bugle for battle and fire the first salvo to announce the new battle for democracy. He reneged. Come Tuesday, my turn. The choice was either to take the bull by the horn or betray the collective conscience and professional integrity of Cameroon Report. I chose the former. My theme, because there 63 was no script whatsoever except Ebssiy’s epitaph, was “The Enemies of Democracy” in which I castigated anti-democratic elements describing same as parliamentary hand-clappers and a certain species of primates i.e. Monkeys. How else could they be described if Ebssiy’s description of their act as buffoonery were right? That Tuesday’s evening newscast was ably anchored by Jonnie McViban. And so less than 72 hours later, Ebssiy, Johnnie and I found ourselves in police custody for the beginning of...