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

56. Street Power versus State Terrorism

227 56 Street Power versus State Terrorism Saturday 1 December 2007 Now that it has become abundantly clear that the Cameroon parliament is a toothless bulldog as it has always been since the country’s flag independence, the citizens have been given no other choice but to take to the streets to express their profound disillusionment with the State and its institutions. Jan Schreiber says “government is an organisation designed to protect those who subscribe to it and to assist them in acquiring basic needs. To do this, it must be at least minimally responsive to the expression of those needs.” When we are told that MPs of the ruling CPDM party accosted the Minister of Finance to persuade him to cause a raise in civil servants’ salaries weeks after the 2008 budget had been tabled before the National Assembly, one wonders whether they were not merely playing to the gallery, in which case, it was a joke in bad taste. It is merely stating the obvious to say the government has failed woefully to respond to the basic needs of the people and has admitted its failure to check inflation, ensure the smooth running of public utilities, provide jobs and guarantee the purchasing power of the masses. In his budgetary speech in Parliament nearly a fortnight ago, the Prime Minister was honest enough to remark that despite efforts to protect consumers’ purchasing power by intensifying dialogue with entrepreneurs and monitoring the distribution of essential commodities in a bid to check galloping inflation and speculative price hikes, the State, in the long run, was not in a position to adequately contain market forces. 228 The solution proposed by government is the enhancement of alternative supply channels for essential commodities, which in reality implies the encouragement of cheaper imports, as was the case this week with regard to cement. The long-term effect of such measures on local industry is anybody’s guess. The refusal of government to raise wages and salaries on grounds that such a decision would trigger inflation is frivolous when we know that while public sector salaries were not only curtailed by 70 percent 14 years ago and have witnessed no increase ever since, and that the annual inflation rate has been officially estimated at three percent, one wonders which came first: the egg or the chicken? Can we honestly attribute the current inflation rate of roughly 20 percent to salary increase? Civil servants, like the sacrificial lamb, have been fleeced without mercy for too long. Their representatives in parliament have barked to no avail and are suffering from sheer fatigue and powerlessness and have hit back the ball squarely on the court of the people. The threat by civil servants to take to the streets on Wednesday is the result of the realisation of their collective helplessness and despondency. The government is not ruffled by such a threat because it controls the sophisticated apparatus of violence and would not hesitate to unleash its dogs of war to quell any street demonstration. When a policeman or soldier pulls a gun and fatally shoots at striking students or any unarmed civilian, he is comforted by the fact that he shall suffer no consequences. He even believes he has an official mandate to use human beings for target practice. Civil disobedience is the least harmful form of violence employed by helpless and oppressed members of civil society whose only crime is that of publicly expressing their disgust with institutions and governments dedicated to the destitution of society to gratify their inflated egos, and ensure compliance and acquiescence of the very citizens from whom they pretend to derive legitimacy. Natural law dictates that the exercise of violence in any context must be proportionate to the real or perceived threat. Even the law of the jungle forbids the killing of an enemy in retreat. When a 229 trigger-happy policeman shoots an unarmed civilian on the occiput, it can no longer be a question of exercising state authority or selfdefence . It is a sheer act of depravity and madness. And these depraved acts of State violence have been rather too rampant in recent times when one reviews the casualties recorded last year at the University of Buea, and a few weeks ago in Kumba, Bamenda and Abong Mbang and so on, involving students in some cases, motorcycle taxi-men protesting police harassment and civilians disgruntled about prolonged electrical power...