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

Introduction

xi Introduction I began writing for the private press in 1991 that is on the dawn of multipartism and the struggle for civil liberties. This was the only option open to me after having parted ways with Radio Cameroon. I had spent a period of incarceration in police cells and the maximum security prison of Nkondengui, Yaounde along with my colleagues Ebssiy Ngum and Johnnie McViban from June to October 1986 as a result of the controversial news talk I delivered titled “Enemies of Democracy” which can be found in a separate collection of writings titled: Incisive Journalism: The Best of Cameroon Report (1978-1986) by Langaa Publishers. As a result of the democratic wind of change blowing from Eastern Europe, Parliament in late 1990 had passed a corpus of laws pompously referred to as “liberty laws” which had considerably eased conditions for setting up a newspaper enterprise and this saw the mushrooming of dozens of newspapers both in English and French. Paddy Mbawa had just returned from journalism training in Nigeria and negotiated with publisher Mr. Ngalim to revive Cameroon Post that had gone comatose for something like two decades. So I began writing in Cameroon Post not as a staff member but an independent contributor. After all I was still a civil servant even if my professional career had been dashed against the rock. The roaring 1990s was marked by a new spirit of self-expression. Anglophone Cameroon whose voice and those of its leaders had not been heard for decades began to find expression. The Anglophone teachers’ union CATTU, the Civil Servants Union, the Parent/Teachers Association and other civil society groups began to emerge as they organized street marches to demand more freedoms and better working conditions. Bamenda was the main theatre of the groundswell of this activism. At the national level, there was mass agitation for a national conference bringing together all the active forces of the society to find solutions to the myriad of problems plaguing the country since independence. xii The government’s response was to sell the idea of a limited constitutional reform process which it could conveniently control. Anglophone political activists however saw the prospects of a constitutional conference as an opportunity to go back to the drawing board regarding the unification of Anglophone (Southern Cameroons) and Francophone Cameroon. They saw the possibility of a second “Foumban Conference” to work out more concrete constitutional guarantees for what was once the mandated territory (under the League of Nations) and later the Trust Territory of Southern Cameroons (under the United Nations) which had now been chopped up into the North-West and South-West provinces of La Republique du Cameroun and its citizens reduced to second class citizens. On the outset, Cameroon Post (which later became The Post in 1998) and the Herald newspapers were the leading English-language tabloids. My preoccupation at the time obviously was the plight of the Southern Cameroons as evidenced by my write-ups of 30 May 1991 (Suggestions for an Ambazonia Caucus-Ambazonia being another name for Southern Cameroons) and 6 June 1991 (What Future for Cameroon Integration?). Writing for Cameroon Post was an on-and-off romance giving the exploitative attitude of all Anglophone newspaper publishers. Inbetween , I wrote for Cameroon Life Magazine, the only Englishlanguage news magazine at the time and a one-off publication “The African Star” in 1996. In 1997, I resumed writing for Cameroon Post and introduced for the first time the SNAPSHOT column. By 1998, Francis Wache and Charlie Ndi Chia split from the dictatorial management of the paper over fundamental managerial issues and created The POST in 1998. I went along with them. These two men had been running the paper ever since Paddy Mbawa was forced to go on exile in the mid- 90s following his exposure of an insurance scam at the agro-industrial corporation CDC which earned him a long prison detention, harassment and threats to life. I later (2001) withdrew my collaboration with The POST because of what I have described as the “exploitative attitude” of publishers. xiii In the meantime I wrote for other publications such as “Insight Magazine”, The Witness tabloid and Manyu Millennium magazine, a regional publication created by the talented Augustine Ayuk Augustine aka AAA. “BOBA Today” was also one of those one-off publications created specifically to commemorate the golden jubilee of the Cameroon Protestant College, Bali- my alma...