commentary:Living together with ghosts and angels

By Asong Ndifor 

Since the Anglophone crisis started last October, the political
rhetoric has been enriched with such recycled clichés like “living
together, one and indivisible, national integration, separatists,
federalists, ‘country Sundays’, dialogue…” The propaganda just ends in
an endless loop.

I often wonder if those who spin such cant are sincere to their
consciences or they just play to the gallery to protect their ‘garri’.
One of the sound bites I like is that of “living together” as if
Cameroonians are living apart. But if you reside two weeks in Yaounde
and the other half of the month in Mutengene, my first home, like I
do, you are bound to swallow that line with a pinch of salt.

When on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in Mutengene, you realize you cannot put air time in your phone because all the shops are shut; you cannot buy feed for your chicken and pigs if you rear them, your lawyer cannot go to court when some sycophants violate your rights, your child has to disguise to school while most are at home and some have been transferred to Francophone regions to attend classes; you must question the propaganda as lip service.

Mutengene is not an exception. The situation is similar or most awful in nearly every nook and cranny of the North West and South West regions as I am reliably told.

In Yaounde, it is a different world, not because when the city
“breathes, Cameroon is fine”, to borrow from President Biya. Classes
are congested and bribes I hear are being offered to get admissions
especially into some government schools. There is no ghost town by the
‘apprentices sorciers’. It is business as usual in Yaounde and the
rest of the Francophone communities. But politically, Yaounde has
sleepless nights thinking how to get the country out of the crisis to
justify ‘living together’ as if Anglophones and Francophobes in the
North West and South West regions are not living in perfect harmony.
They both are in the same soup.
 My conscience and truth do not make me believe that we as
Cameroonians are living together, being each other’s keeper. I am
comfortable that those of us on the streets should, without resort to
threats and violence, protest, demonstrate and petition when office
holders fail to solve our problems.

Ghost towns are aspects of peaceful protest if people are not
forced to close their shops and in the same way, officials in their
hubris to defend their masters to the hilt, should not compel those
who elect to shut their shops in protest, to open them.

There is no question that the ghost towns have worked to draw
attention to the marginalization of Anglophones and a visibly
pressed-to-the-wall government has made some significant concessions to redress the sad situation. 

On that score, the “Governing Council” in exile which I understand
is now at the driving seat of the protest, should call the ghost towns off,
or suspend it and use it only occasionally when there is need. Lawyers
should also suspend their boycott given the concessions the government has offered.

In the same logic, school children should be allowed to go
to school in the two regions to avoid rushing them to schools in the
Francophone regions because of intimidation and insecurity in the two
regions, which is not my understanding of living together.

While the chief priest of the ghosts makes that concession, the
government should heed the yearnings of the governed and create a
national  atmosphere of living together in a genuine democratic
society where justice, separation of power, respect of the inalienable
rights of mankind,  free, fair and transparent elections  are allowed to blossom.
Postscript: When brothers agree, no fortress is as strong as their
common life - Antisthenes