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The Sign of Things to Come
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167 The Sign of Things to Come T his week we can pause to celebrate some victories. What victories? Well, you may justifiably not consider that we have won any victories yet worth celebrating. But I would differ with you there and maintain that we have recently gained certain footholds, which as signs of things to come, are very significant and worth celebrating. I am thinking here of the GCE and the Commonwealth. Cameroon’s CONDITIONAL admission into the Commonwealth of Nations is worth celebrating. It is very important that the admission is conditional. We have never doubted the importance of belonging to the Commonwealth. Our problem has been that we knew all along that the New Deal regime of former Mr., later Dr. and now Professor (honoris causa, Beijing) Paul Biya, was only using admission into the Commonwealth as a gimmick to better help it in the suppression and assimilation of Anglophones, better known as Southern Cameroonians. There is no strategy so effective as taking control of the weapons an enemy could possibly use against you. Is that not what has happened to democracy in this country? Fearing the democratic hurricane as it approached, the regime gave up its stiff resistance and took control of the process so as to direct it away from it natural goal. See where we are today. Had the regime put up an honest fight, it would have long been routed and we should already have been enjoying and celebrating democracy in this country. The CAM lobby must have worked very well at Nicosia, Cyprus. Cameroon is welcome to join the Commonwealth in two years’ time as its 51st member, PROVIDED it 168 Godfrey B. Tangwa (Rotcod Gobata) measures up to the Harrare Declaration which emphasizes democracy, human and minority rights. This means that we will have federation before then. And then, the federated state of Southern Cameroons will be in the Commonwealth exactly what La République du Cameroun is presently in the Francophonie. To an Anglophone Cameroonian, the Francophonie means absolutely nothing. But it is meaningful and important to Francophones. In like manner, the Commonwealth cannot mean anything to a Francophone Cameroonian, but it means everything to an Anglophone. The second victory we must pause to celebrate is the installation of the Chairman of the GCE Board, Mr S.N. Dioh, at Buea which, incidentally, occurred on the same day as our conditional admission into the Commonwealth, namely, Monday 25th October, 1993. Did you listen to “Luncheon Date” on that day? If you did you must have heard Auntie (or is it anti?) Becky Ndive, who excitedly anticipated the news and announced the installation with the same breathless alacrity and glee with which she has usually read the outrageously autocratic and repressive communiqués of the psychopathic Governor. What Becky did was illegal, since “Luncheon Date” is now strictly only for announcements, but we loved it. As one of the lawmakers , she should know how to bend or break the law when it becomes necessary. So, is it not quite clear after all that all of us stand to gain from a credible educational system? Will Peter Agbor Tabi’s children and Peter Oben Ashu’s children not benefit from our struggles before my own children, the oldest of whom is still only three? Our next struggle will be for a credibly autonomous English language channel of CRTV. I hope that auntie Becky Ndive and even the likes of Fai Wo Tahshitiy and Judas Lukariot (with a wink to the Hearld’s Musings) will be with us the day we decide to march through Mballa II to Unity Palace to press home this particular demand. They will be the immediate beneficiaries of that demand. [44.202.128.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:16 GMT) 169 I Spit on their Graves: Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle But in spite of the installation of the Chairman of the GCE Board, and TAC’s willingness to immediately start marking the GCE, Dr. Robert Mbella Mbappe and his collaborators has persisted in a logic of senseless defiance and intransigence that is very surprising for an octogenarian of his standing. Is a grey moustache not at least a sign of some practical wisdom garnered from experience through the years? The answer is blowing in the wind. Mbella Mbappe’s people are refusing genuine GCE markers access into the marking centres. The Francophone adventurers he recruited before have continued damaging the GCE scripts. And his...