"Will the MDR set the course for true political change in Cameroon thereby making history or will they join Biya to bring about some cosmetic changes and continue to lord over the people?" Le Messager, March 23, 1992.
"In a context of unleashed passions, people (politicians) don't yet have to calmness of mind to assess our courage and our sense of responsibility. History will prove us right." Dakole Daissala, La Vision, 15 Juin 1992.
Dakole Daissala, the Camerounian opposition politician who famously threw in his lot with the ruling CPDM regime after the multiparty legislative elections in April 1992, died this week in Yaounde at age 79. Dakole wanted to be remembered as the hero of Cameroonian democracy, as the one who saved the country from the clutches of political extremists on both sides of the isle. 30 years after he threw in his lot with the Biya regime the verdict is in. Or is it? Here is the story of those fateful events of March-April 1992.
In the beginning...
One of the most dramatic and unexpected outcomes of the [1992 multiparty legislative] election was the rise to prominence of the MDR, an ethnic party based in the Kirdi-dominated Far North province, which changed the balance of power in Cameroon at the expense of the Muslim north.
The MDR was created in June 1991 by Dakolle Daissala, one of the few Kirdis with a university education in the 1960s. Suspected of involvement in the April 1984 coup attempt, he was jailed for seven years although no charges were ever brought against him. He was released following the presidential amnesty of April 1991.
Although the MDR manifesto stated that the party hoped to establish "a tolerant [Cameroonian] society where cultural differences would be a source of human and national enrichment rather than a liability or a source of division" (Ngniman, 1993: 172), the MDR was singularly interested in challenging UNDP and Fulani hegemony in the Grand North, and to awaken the hitherto dormant Kirdi consciousness.
Not surprisingly, the birth of the MDR coincided with an exacerbation of ethno-religious tensions in the Grand North, and the beginning of a vicious war of words between the Kirdi and Fulani communities.
The resolve of the Kirdi elites to take charge of their destiny and to join the national political mainstream whenever possible was confirmed by the MDR's participation in the March legislative election. By winning the six available seats in the Mayo-Danay and Kaele divisions, the MDR instantly hoisted itself as the power broker in the country, with Dakole Daissala becoming the man who would decide if the multiparty National Assembly would be controlled by a pro-government majority or an opposition majority. As Adolph Mungo Dipoko pointed out, “He is better placed now, even more than Biya, to turn the course of events towards a brand-new horizon.”
Kofele-Kale in his memo to the US House of Representatives (1992a) had intimated that there would be the need for one of the regional parties in the assembly to coalesce with a minority ethnic party to obtain a majority. That ethnic party was the MDR, which more than any other, symbolized the ethnicization of politics or the politicization of ethnicity – a party that entered parliament solely on an ethnic ticket.
From a purely regional perspective, the six seats obtained by the MDR in two divisions of the Far North merely caused a dent in the UNDP's political dominance of the Grand North but the effect of that dent on the national scene was far more significant. Since neither of the two dominant parties in the election came out with a clear majority of seats, each needed the backing of an ethnic or minor party like the MDR to gain control of parliament and thus form a government.
In an article titled “The Dilemma of Dakole Daissala,” Le Messager aptly summed up the two options open to the MDR President:
As the bells of history toll and summon Dakole Daissala to halt the political downward drift of Cameroon and to help change Cameroon from a crisis-prone monolithic to a multiparty democracy, which way will he go? Will the MDR set the course for true political change in Cameroon thereby making history or will they join Biya to bring about some cosmetic changes and continue to lord over the people?
On March 9, President Biya received Dakole Daissala at Unity Palace in what was described as a red-carpet treatment worthy of a foreign dignitary. At the end of the one-hour meeting, Dakole Daissala declared that:
Our victory today gives us added/additional responsibilities and we would like to emphasize that, right from the beginning, we had opted for a peaceful transition that would be beneficial for everyone… in the MDR, we have always stated that more than ever before, we will not accept to be absent from those institutions where the destiny of the nation is determined. If we believe that we can contribute to real change, we will do so in accordance with our original focus.
The UNDP President also met with Dakole Daissalla on March 25, to prevent an alliance between the CPDM and MDR. The first multiparty parliamentary session began without the MDR revealing if it was going to ally with the opposition or with the Biya regime.
On March 10, the new multiparty National Assembly convened amidst high hopes that opposition parties would form an alliance that would put the CPDM in the minority, take control of the National Assembly, and form a coalition government.
The CPDM – MDR Alliance is Born
On March 27, MPs reconvened for a plenary session to elect a 30-person ad hoc committee charged with studying the UNDP and UPC bills. The first crack within the opposition, which had thus far presented a united front, occurred when instead of electing the committee as scheduled, the MDR allied with the CPDM to vote in favor of postponing the review of the UNDP and UPC bills to the June session. With 94 votes against the 86 of the UNDP and UPC, the motion passed to the dismay of opposition supporters who had been looking forward to a new parliament where CPDM would confined to the role of a minority party. This was the first clear indication that the opposition coalition might not become a reality and that the MDR was determined to marginalize the UNDP at national level whatever it took.
The CPDM/MDR alliance took a more concrete form on March 31 when the 94-member strong MDR-CPDM majority alliance elected a new 14-member National Assembly Bureau in the absence of the 86 UNDP and UPC MPs who boycotted the election on grounds that the elections were based on archaic and undemocratic rules that favored the CPDM.
During the election of the new bureau, the CPDM won 11 seats while the MDR, the junior partner in the alliance, won three. Thus, after a month of intense pressure from the new parliamentary opposition and the Biya regime, the MDR leadership finally threw its lot with the ruling CPDM. Although many observers of the Cameroonian political scene have concluded, based on this "unnatural" alliance, that the MDR and its leadership are creations of the CPDM,[2] there is ample evidence to argue that the MDR’s action were dictated primarily by the peculiar socio-political landscape of the Grand North. As Le Messager put it; “Dakole Daissala is the product of a combination of factors in the Far North such as frustration, injustice, accumulated resentment, and the desire for self-assertion, as well as that of appearing as 'the messiah of the Kirdi’”.
With the birth of the CPDM-MDR alliance, the Muslim north which had overwhelmingly supported the UNDP (which won every single seat in the North and Adamaoua provinces), was pushed further to the fringes of the Cameroonian political mainstream. Bello Bouba’s dream of becoming either the Speaker of the House or Prime Minister in the event of an opposition alliance also went up in flames. Instead, the MDR and CPDM teamed up to elect Cavaye Yegue Djibril, a Kirdi CPDM parliamentarian from the Far North Province, as House Speaker thereby upsetting the existing “balance of power” in the Grand North which dictated that the first or second personalities of the state would be Fulani/Fulbe – Ahidjo first as Prime Minister then President, and Bello Bouba and Sadou Hayatou as Prime Ministers. The appointment of Cavaye was therefore interpreted as a sanction of the Muslim-dominated North and Adamaoua provinces where the UNDP won all the available parliamentary seats.
With the election of the national assembly bureau a done deal, the first multiparty session of parliament officially ended on April 1, 1992 amidst widespread anger at Dakole Daisala who was accused of “miss[ing] his rendez-vous with history and look[ing] like a mercenary.” Dakole however argued that his alliance with the CPDM was based on the “higher interest of the nation,” and insisted that history would ultimately prove that he made the right choice:
We're calling everyone to reason because we believe there is a third way between the immobilism [of the CPDM] and the extremism [of the opposition]; that is the option that we have adopted for the higher interest of the nation... I am convinced that the MDR method will bring about change... we must distinguish between radical change and evolutionary, progressive change. Some parties tried the radical method to achieve change... it failed... Perhaps it is time to consider other paths to change... sure, in a context of unleashed passions, people (politicians) don't yet have to calmness of mind to assess our courage and our sense of responsibility. History will prove us right.
Culled from "Reform and Repression: The Tumultuous Beginnings of Cameroon's Democratization Experiment, 1990-1992," forthcoming.
The history of this nations would have changed radically had the SDF not, unwisely to many Cameroonians, boycotted the 1992 elections that gave Dakole Daissala so much leverage in the Cameroonian political scene. From that moment, the SDF political machinery lost steam from which it has never recovered. Today, it's a mere shadow of its previous buoyant self.
Posted by: Martin Jumbam | August 11, 2022 at 12:33 PM
Nice read. It's eye opening on the politics ongoing in the Northern part of the country. For many years Cameroonians pretended not to operate on tribal lines, but events like this demonstrate otherwise. The actual president knows how to play his cards well...
History is showing he made a terrible choice. After 1997 elections many political parties played the maintenance card in the political scene.
Posted by: Ndenkuesson | August 15, 2022 at 11:51 PM