My Inquisitive Pen

Cameroon’s Military And The Big Lie

By Chief Bisong Etahoben

The Cameroonian military has over and above all, been the focus of special attention over the past several months that most Cameroonians have begun asking themselves whether they are really safe in their own country. Besides the usual punitive expeditions of some rotten apples within this corps visited on innocent citizens from time to time in order to fill their pockets with extortion money, the recent accusations being levelled against the military in this country are beginning to make knowledgeable Cameroonian shiver that the worst is yet to come.

Since Cameroon’s renewal with a semblance of democracy over the past eighteen years, the army has been the focus of special attention by the ruling government in Yaounde which has continued to shower various amenities on the military to the extent that other professionals in government service have already started asking whether we all are still living in the same country.

In order to turn a deaf ear and its eyes the other way whilst the ruling party and its operatives rig elections and perpetuate their stay in power, the military including the police force has been so blessed with increased salaries in the wake of an over 50% slash in the salaries of other government workers that in some cases, police and military bodyguards to some senior civil servants earn more than their masters. I still vividly remember a case in Limbe where a late friend who was one of the Assistant SDOs for Fako refused to accept the military greetings of his bodyguard because the said bodyguard earned more than my friend whose subordinate he was.

Thus, while most Cameroonians have been suffering the effects of slashed salaries, devaluation and a steep rise in the cost of living, the military in this country has been having feast days, swimming in the royalties from increased oil prices whilst Ndian division from which most of the oil is tapped does not even have a passable road.

All this largesse does not however seem to satisfy Cameroon’s military. The more one enjoys, the more grows the desire to enjoy, it is said. And so, the appetite of Cameroon’s military has been growing by leaps and bounds pushing them, with their intimidatory military gear to adventure into new fields of endeavour in order to acquire more wealth for themselves. This appetite for the good life has reduced the Cameroon military into mere shadows of the arms professionals they are supposed to be and so, any threat to their continued enjoyment sends them shuttling into their shells. That is why the military, police and gendarmes scurried into holes as Limbe was being sacked by armed invaders in the night of September 27-28.

I have tried to dig into my 56-year-old memory to remember some brave expeditions carried out by our military that could endear them to the ordinary Cameroonian and each time I come out blank, leading me to start believing that senility has begun setting in. But my memory cannot be that void of the episodes of bravado by our men and women in arms if there were any number to write home about.

Most recently, our military is reported to have administered a real lesson on some Niger Delta militants who dared to venture into Cameroonian territory around Bakassi. Some of the said militants were killed and others were alleged to have been captured. We are yet to be shown them and already, there are rumours that the individuals allegedly killed and captured were actually fisher people on whom our military vented their frustrations after several humiliating raids by Niger Delta militants into our territory.

If the recent declarations by the Minister of Armed Forces Réné Ze Meka claiming that he knew the bandits who sacked banks in Limbe were coming adding that it was because of the military’s readiness that more damage was not done to Limbe are anything to go by, then Cameroonians have been the subjects of the big lie all along. I say this because Ze Meka lied through and through. There was no intervention by the military to curtail the damage done by the bandits who sacked the banks and the said bandits inflicted maximum damage as could be expected from such an operation. There was no military intervention though there are military bases that virtually surround Limbe.

With this hindsight, it is easy to deduce that ours is a military that has been working for its own security and cares very little for the overall security of our national territory and its inhabitants.

Before the most recent scandals involving the military, there have been several others in the past, one of which was the fire at the armoury in Yaounde about which rumours hold that it was arson not an accidental fire. The tongues say that the armoury was set ablaze in order to hide a massive embezzlement of acquisition allocations that had been embezzled with no armour to show for the spent money. What better way was there to hide the theft than destroy the armoury and explain things away by saying the acquired armour had been destroyed in the blaze. As we went to press, there was another fire incident reported at the military headquarters involving the destruction of documents and equipment. Who knows what might be behind this other fire?

All may not be lost though with our military. We know that the military engineering corps has been doing a great job constructing roads and building infrastructures that have been helping to make life for ordinary Cameroonians a little more liveable. To those patriotic Cameroonians carrying out this work, we doff our hats.

ANOTHER SEPTEMBER SIGNED OFF IN GRAND STYLE!

By Tazoacha Asonganyi in Yaounde

September does not seem to be a special month only in the USA! It is a month usually pregnant in Cameroon with mischief!

It was when September 2006 was wrapping up that the present government was formed. Then we were told that standing instructions to members of the new government were to obey the PM! With all the water that has gone under the bridge, it actually looks now like the PM is presiding in impotence over an impotent government! The government looks more like a conscript army where members seem to be doing their duties but have doubtful faith in their commander... and in one another. If it were not Cameroon, the scandals that have been unfolding and festooning the entire government, would have led to the birth of another government in September.

Roosevelt’s new deal was brought about because he believed that people who are hungry and people who are poor are the stuff with which dictatorships are made. The poverty and hunger that took us to the streets in February were still with us in September because the Cameroonian version of the new deal survives precisely because of hunger and poverty. As is customary with the new deal, there were speeches upon speeches, promises upon promises, conferences upon conferences, but all just for the sake of giving the impression that something was happening. It was little more than spectacle.

Mobile phones and other communication gadgets are supposed to increase our security by reducing the distance between us and the security services. Many media outlets remind us on a daily basis, the numbers to call when there is a fire or a thief or anything that needs the immediate intervention of the security forces. When we finally sense danger and call these numbers, we usually meet with silence or lack of cooperation because there is no means of moving to the danger due to … lack of petrol! Sometimes, the lack of cooperation is due to the absence of a “chef” to give orders for action to be taken.

And so we were left to watch helplessly as Limbe was taken hostage and ransacked! This was either due to this generalised nonchalance or to the absence of orders from hierarchy. Otherwise, how can one explain that with the abundance of cell phones and the availability of access numbers of security services, Limbe turned out to be so naked? Our security forces have abandoned the citizens to their fate for so long, and might have thought that it was the same old situation of the citizen fighting the thief or the fire alone, with untimely deaths or unnecessary loss of property. Again, if we were not in Cameroon, there would have been resignations and sackings!

With the collapse of communism and the economic system it incarnated, there were boasts from ultra-liberals that the market would start the new millennium as an economic deity. We were told that the free market is like a sensitive nervous system that responds to events and signals in the market place with indifference to the status, religion or race of the actors. There were retorts from the left that capitalism by nature is ruthless, and leads to unfair income distribution, social injustice and human indignity; therefore there is need to influence free market forces through taxes, benefits, regulations, supervision and discipline.

The closing of September with the collapse of markets in the hands of especially ultraliberal regimes is testimony to the fact that the market is an incompletely understood monster. The collapse informs us that ultra-liberal economists are not the scientists they claim they are because of the present grotesque gamble to save the market! Economists, like scientists may deal in figures, graphs, and computer print-outs, but their gamble of correlating reactions of need and greed to past actions of government, with the hope of predicting the reactions of the “greedy” to future, similar actions is not science because the results cannot be repeated over and over again by different economists in different settings. It is dawning on them that the behaviour of the greedy is not easily predictable: when faced with a situation of “greed”, they can hoard and save, just as they can spend and waste, leading to excess and collapse of prices, or scarcity and the soaring of prices that are with us today.

Cameroonians easily equate capitalism with corruption because of the degree to which corruption accompanies the various efforts to force “ideal” capitalism down the throat of the new deal regime. Although cronyism is an attitude dictated more by opportunism than loyalty, the new deal has constantly sought the company of loyalists in the hope that they would help the prince to forget his own woes, since they would not judge his actions. This has been a great disservice to the country as a whole because under the cloak of party loyalty, thieves and thugs emptied the public treasury, leaving our economy in tatters. They were helped along by the conviction that since this did not result in a penalty of some kind for over two decades, their behaviour was the norm.

September ended with white-collar rogues continuing to have sleepless nights, and the rest of us momentarily choking in mocking laughter! September ended with ultra-liberals using socialist strategies to save capitalism!.

Saving Cameroonians From The Sticky Fingers Of Centralised Cash Disbursement

Almost the whole of last week, access to offices in the Ministries of Secondary Education and Higher Education in Yaounde was very difficult because secondary school teachers from all the ten provinces of the country had converged there in a carefully calculated move to force the powers that be to pay their transport allowances.

Most of those Cameroonians who had to spend money to come to Yaounde to demonstrate their anger at not being paid their dues had been waiting for the said money for over one year now. And during this time, without salaries, they were expected to go to their stations of posting by one knows not what means.

Nevertheless, most of them, as usual, still found the means to travel to the schools to which they were posted to teach Cameroonian children. Most did not care to move to their new stations and others even took up jobs teaching in private schools whilst waiting for the money.

One may be forced to ask: Why must teachers from all the ten provinces of the country come to Yaounde in order to be paid their transport allowances? Why can’t the money be sent to the provincial or divisional treasuries around the country for disbursement so that teachers do not abandon classes and spend money to come to Yaounde?

Asked this question in an interview published in Cameroon Tribune of Friday September 12, 2008, the Director of Material and Financial Resources in the Ministry of Secondary Education, Mr. Thomas-Louis Minkongo said it was not possible to send the money to provincial or divisional treasuries because they of that department in the Ministry of Secondary Education do not always know in advance where teachers have to be posted in order to make the necessary arrangements for the payment to be decentralised.

This answer can be very annoying to enlightened Cameroonians who know that officialdom in this country does everything to ensure that everything remains in Yaounde so that Cameroonians are compelled to come to Yaounde to give bribe in order to take possession of what rightly belongs to them.

Mr. Minkongo spoke as if we are still at the age when the wheel was still to be invented. Is it not the same Ministry of Secondary Education that posts teachers to the various schools? How long does it take to go through the list of transferred teachers to know where new graduates have been posted?

Besides, most of the teachers who came to Yaounde have been waiting for over a year to be paid the said money. Does Mr. Minkongo want to tell Cameroonians that for over one year, the Department of Material and Human Resources in the Ministry of Secondary Education could not get the relevant information in order to know where to direct money intended for newly-transferred teachers? Would these same teachers have to come to Yaounde before receiving their salaries? If not, to where are their salaries being channelled? If the destinations of their salaries are known, why can’t the transport allowances be sent to the same salary destinations?

Mr. Minkongo’s simplistic reason for not decentralising the disbursement of transport allowances buttresses the long held argument that officialdom in Yaounde deliberately centralises financial disbursements in order to con beneficiaries out of part of their emoluments.

Last week, the press was awash with allegations by those who had then succeeded in receiving their transport allowances that pay agents retained some of their money on the pretext that they did not have “change”. Individuals who were to receive 202.000 FCFA ended up receiving but 200.000 FCFA on the excuse that there was no ‘small money’ to meet up with the complete payment. And there were hundreds of teachers who reported having been so short-changed.

This type of theft from ordinary Cameroonians, which at first looks seems little, but which ends up amounting to millions of FCFA is so rampant that some people have begun passing it for public policy. It is not and the earlier the National Anti-corruption Commission starts checking it, the better for the image of this government both in the eyes of the ordinary Cameroonian public service users and our foreign partners.

Marafa, Non Residential Mayors And The CPDM Double Speak.

The Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation, Marafa Hamidou Yaya last week signed an order giving all Mayors resident out of their council areas thirty days to move there or …? What would he do if they don’t respect the order? That is where the order itself is silent.

The truth is that more than fifty percent of all Mayors, especially CPDM Mayors are resident out of their areas of jurisdiction. Before becoming Mayors, these individuals, most of whom hold senior positions in the administration, were heads of their lists at the municipal elections and these lists were sent to the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation for vetting before they were finally allowed to contest. It is generally known that those who head lists at the municipal elections always end up being elected Mayors.

These individuals are usually the main financers of the election campaigns, and in the case of CPDM Mayors, they do so with money acquired through the manipulation of budgetary allocations in the ministerial departments they head or where they work.

What we are trying to say here is that the Minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation knew that these individuals were not resident in the council areas where they were putting up their candidatures before allowing them to contest. He also knew that they would eventually be elected Mayors but still went ahead and authorised them to contest. Who is deceiving whom here?

This other “forward today, backward tomorrow” decision by Marafa Hamidou Yaya further heralds this government’s lackadaisical way of treating important national issues. They knowingly allow a wrong to be done then turn round to pretend to be against it.

Several years ago, government budgeted 70 billion (70.000.000.000) FCFA for the purchase of vehicles. After allowing the various ministries to purchase some vehicles, thus enabling budget controllers to make billions from padded invoices, the government suddenly turned around and ordered that the vehicles be sold! Overnight, vehicles, which cost the taxpayer more than 30.000.000 FCFA apiece, were bought for 2.000.000 FCFA or less by the same people who had made billions from their purchase in the first place. And then, these same people sold these vehicles back to government as new ones when government discovered they still needed the vehicles!

The most vexing part of this rigmarole is that people like Marafa who issue these ‘undoing’ orders as in the case of the Mayors, know that they would not be respected because the people involved are their colleagues on high who know Marafa can do them nothing when they disobey his orders. It has always been so in the conduct of government business in this country.

Coming at this time when government is ostensibly said to be combating corruption and embezzlement and trying to perfect its good governance strategy, one is forced to see some double-speak: Talking one thing with this side of the mouth, and supporting just the opposite from the other side of the mouth.

Doesn’t government by now know that Cameroonians know more than to be taken for simpletons to be lied to and manipulated on a regular basis? The good thing here is that enlightened Cameroonians are daily made to better know the kind of leaders they have and each fib by government ministers and their assigns only helps direct the breeze to the anus of the chicken thus exposing it for what it really is. Le Cameroun c’est le Cameroun indeed!