God the Politician

8. Patriots and Gangsters

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Patriots and Gangsters ictatorship thrives on the ignorance of the masses. That is why the dictatorship of Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four has as one of its governing slogans ‘Ignorance is strength’. Mind poisoning is employed where knowledge prevails. This justifies the second slogan ‘freedom is slavery’. But the policy which is used on a permanent basis is summed up by the slogan ‘war is peace’. The ruler chooses war not because he loves bloodshed but because it is an easier weapon to wield than diplomacy and sound administration. Diplomacy requires the power of logic which the dictator is highly deficient in. War is therefore used where intellect fails. To divert the attention of the governed from his bad and inefficient administration, the regime of Big Brother in Oceania makes sure that the Ministry of Peace (MINIPAX) is constantly churning up rumours of war against its neighbours, Eastasia and Eurasia. George Orwell’s world consists of only these three nations. The hullabaloo about the war between Cameroon and Nigeria over the Bakassi Peninsula was nothing but a diversionary ploy by the government of late Nigerian President Sani Abacha and Cameroon’s Paul Biya. The politics of diversion has been Biya’s stock in trade since 1990 because he hates democracy though he wouldn’t stop talking it. When the SDF was launched in 1990 and six people were shot to death in Bamenda, he quickly used the World Cup in Italy to divert the attention of the Cameroonian people who were particularly vexed by the killings. During the Ghost Towns Operation in 1991, the regime and its acolytes like late Jean Fochive and Paul Nji Atanga used every strategy they could conceive of to break it. Atanga bought 72 taxis which Fochive appointed security men to drive in Douala where the Ghost Town Operation was crippling the economy. When this failed, the regime was left with no other alternative than to announce a tripartite conference in 1991 to divert the public’s attention from the idea of a sovereign national conference which was the justification for the Ghost Towns and civil disobedience campaigns embarked upon by the Coordination of Opposition Parties and Associations. The Tripartite Conference as earlier D 64 indicated, was followed by parliamentary and then presidential elections. When Fru Ndi and the Union for Change claimed that their victory has been stolen, Biya slammed a state of emergency on the Northwest. The world forgot about the ‘stolen victory’ and became concerned about human rights abuses. Before the state of emergency was lifted, the regime had conceived another strategy to enable the public forget it. Bill Clinton’s inauguration became a Cameroonian affair with the media sustaining a sterile debate on who was or who was not invited to the inauguration. I had to introduce this long digression to illustrate the point that Cameroonians and the world do not really see through these strategies. They continue to count on the good faith of the Biya regime believing that the nation is making progress democratically whereas, we are dancing on the spot. We are actually behaving like someone in a rocking chair which is only turning round and not moving forward. The year 1993 began with a major world event: the inauguration of newly elected US President Bill Clinton. The presence of Fru Ndi at the ceremony raised high expectations among his numerous supporters back home. The SDF chairman was very conscious of this and to keep the flame of their hopes burning, SDF supporters abroad tried to give the impression of conviviality by employing the photo trick. An expert cameraman successfully brought the pictures of Fru Ndi and Clinton together and gave the semblance of two people shaking hands or involved in conversation. The photo trick had been used earlier to substitute the head of a sick white man with that of French President, François Mitterrand in a photo captioned ‘The Naked Emperor’. A similar substitution of heads within the same period replaced the heads of Indomitable Lions players with those of politicians believed to be committed to democratic change. Fru Ndi was the goalkeeper of the political team dubbed the Indomitable Lions of Change. The Clinton-Fru Ndi photo formula achieved the purpose for which it was intended. Cameroonians continued to believe US warships and marines were in echauvement preparing to come and topple Biya. It was against a backdrop of this optimism that Fru Ndi and his political allies launched...