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

81. Stop These Agents of Confusion: The Farce about British Northern Cameroons

339 81 Stop These Agents of Confusion: The Farce about British Northern Cameroons** April 28th, 2009 The diversionary activities of a certain Martin Ateh Chia (said to be the leader of an obscure movement called British Cameroons, (Britcam) which seem to have been allowed to go unchallenged in recent times, are now becoming a grave cause for concern and may in the long run prove to be inimical to the Southern Cameroons’ nationalist struggle. We have been made to understand that the said Mr. Chia has been peddling a rather dangerous political doctrine that has begun to sow seeds of discord within the ranks of bona fide Southern Cameroonian nationalists. This dangerous doctrine consists in deceiving unsuspecting Southern Cameroonians who may not have taken the trouble to learn and understand the contours of their tortuous history, a history bedevilled by self-seeking revisionists, collaborators, fifth columnists and congenital traitors. Mr. Chia’s deceitful ploy consists in spreading the false theory that the restoration of Southern Cameroons’ independence cannot be achieved without the involvement of what was once known as Northern British Cameroon which today forms parts of three different states in Northeastern Nigeria. It would seem that Mr. Chia arrived at this conclusion by satanic inspiration or simply by reading the United Nations instruments on decolonisation upside down. We have a bounding duty to challenge and put a halt to this tendency to distort or misinterpret history, which in this case is playing in favour of our common adversary who can only rejoice in the dissipation of our collective energy and resources resulting from these diversionary activities. Nowhere was it ever suggested or implied in the UN Charter or resolutions that the administering authorities of Trust territories i.e. 340 Britain and France were to grant independence or autonomy to these territories simultaneously or en block. With regard to British Southern Cameroons and British Northern Cameroons, it must be pointed out that at no given period were the two administered as one territory. When the Allied Forces i.e. Britain and France sacked Germany out of its protectorate of Kamerun at the beginning of the First World War, France took the greater part of the booty to the east while Britain contented itself with two strips of territory to the west that were contiguous to the eastern border of the British so-called protectorate of Nigeria. The southern strip stretching from Rio del Rey in the Gulf of Guinea to Nkambe was simply named the Southern Cameroons while the northern strip stretching from the Adamawa area through the Benue right up to Bornu and the Lake Chad region was called Northern Cameroons. From the outset, Britain had found it expedient to administer Northern Cameroons as part and parcel of northern Nigeria and the Southern Cameroons as part of southern Nigeria at first and later as part of the Eastern region when Britain split its Nigerian possession into three main administrative units in 1946. The borders separating the British Northern and Southern Cameroons were formally established in that same year. There was no political or administrative interaction between the two entities and the only thing they shared in common was the name Cameroon because even during the German era ,the Reich had not had the opportunity to set up any meaningful administrative , economic or communications network in its relatively vast protectorate of Kamerun. In effect, the two territories had followed separate paths to self-determination. When Southern Cameroons representatives in the Eastern Nigerian House of Assembly in Enugu declared that enough was enough and walked out for good from the House in 1953, an act that was meant to assert their personality as representatives of a UN Trust territory who wanted to wash their hands off the politics of Nigeria (a British colony) and called for a separate House of Assembly in Buea (Southern Cameroons), they did not call on Northern Cameroons to join them. 341 Self-determination is a principle applied on a case by case basis, taking into consideration the peculiarities of each aspiring territory and the expressed wishes of its inhabitants. How Mr. Martin Ateh Chia came about the idea that the restoration of Southern Cameroons independence cannot be valid without involving the defunct Northern Cameroons can only be the work of the devil. The man has conveniently forgotten that UN-sponsored plebiscites to determine the wishes of the peoples of the two territories were organised...