“How far will Biya go?” That seems to be the most commonly asked question these days as the public impatiently waits for more “heads to roll" as a result of Biya’s anti-corruption campaign. However, a recent interview given to The Post Newspaper by Garga Haman Adji (AKA "the whale hunter”), a former Minister of Public Service and Administrative Reforms, raises a more relevant question: How far should Biya go, given the mind-boggling depth of institutionalized corruption in Cameroon?
Continue reading "How Far WILL Biya Go — and How Far SHOULD He Go?" »
I just watched bits and pieces of the closing ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics on TV. From an organizational stand point, the Italians have everything to be proud of. But these games lacked the passion and drama of the 2002 Salt Lake City games. In fact, the most memorable event of the 2006 games was the doping scandal involving the Austrian team. Here in the United States, Bryant Gumbel’s putdown of the Winter Olympics on HBO generated more passion than the performance of any athlete in Turin, and virtually started a mini race war.
On January 23, 2006, Amadou Ali, Cameroon’s Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals, who also doubles as Vice Prime Minister, revealed to the press that the judiciary was reviewing some six files on corruption. About a month later, on February 21, 2006, a terse statement from the Minister informed the public that "Judicial cases have been opened against a number of officials accused of embezzlement, corruption, forgery and use of forgeries."
In June 2004, Cameroon came to a virtual standstill for close to a week following a rumor that President Paul Biya had died in Switzerland. This was just another in a long series of rumors that appear with mathematical regularity on the Cameroonian socio-political scene. Without doubt, rumor, popularly referred to as Radio trottoir (sidewalk radio), is part and parcel of Cameroonian life. And, it is driven by the absence of trustworthy information from the official channels of communications and the need of the masses to be informed about key events and personalities.
In 1991, prominent Cameroonian historian 
Le Front, a biweekly French-language newspaper, has published what it describes as the ""Hit Parade of Billionaire Civil Servants" in Cameroon in its February 9, 2006 issue (no. 065). According to the newspaper, the names, banks, and accounts of the civil servants involved were revealed by "American financial networks" who have traced the bulk of the accounts to banks in Spain, South Africa, Portugal, Switzerland and Monaco. Le Front claims to have obtained the list from “most reliable sources at the very top of the Cameroonian State.”
It's [45] years to the day since the British Southern Cameroons voted, in a United Nations-sponsored plebiscite, to unify with the French Cameroons (then known as La Republique du Cameroun) to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon.
On the eve of the 1961 Plebiscite, EML Endeley’s Cameroon Peoples National Convention (CPNC) released a lengthy pamphlet warning Southern Cameroonians of the dangers that lurked ahead in case they voted for unification with the French Cameroons. The message was described as "eternal evidence of the full note of WARNING that is being sounded in good time to all Cameroon people before they make their historic choice of February 11."
In December 1994, John Ngu Foncha, the “architect" of the unification of Cameroon, spoke at length about the outcome of the unification between the British and French Cameroons. This was just before he walked out of Biya's Constitutional Consultative Commission which had refused to include a discussion of constitutional protections of Anglophone minority rights on its agenda. Here are excerpts of what turned out to be Foncha’s last major public declaration on the Cameroon unification experiment:
Three weeks after the issue erupted on the national scene like a volcano, Cameroonians are still talking about the 
Recent Comments