FrancAfrique Dans L'Afrique: The Old Power Generation(1)

Louis Egbe Mbua

If we put it that a true and responsible government will exit power by the ballot box rather than recycling old hands tainted with their corrupt practices, then the regime of Mr. Paul Biya is a disgrace. For more than twenty seven years he has been peddling with the lives of the Cameroonian people with his useless and foolish tribal politics geared towards pleasing his colonial master, France while maintaining an incompetent regime; a justification which no one can put pen to paper. For several years, he has been deluding himself with one discredited cabinet reshuffle after another with an apparently warped view that the country will change by some enchantment from Le Grand Sorcier; and a magic wand.

In retrospect, his immature dictatorial regime has dragged the country into a league of unimaginable beggary. Since Mr. Biya came to power in 1982, he has been a dependent of the IMF for handouts and cut-throat loans, fraudulent privatisation of the country's patrimony, such as the Tole Tea Estate, with dreadful results; and which, the meagre funds, are again cyclically embezzled by gangs of national thieves over the years.

The problems of that West African country is so vast that it would take at least half a century to wipe out corruption and the wicked social and financial mis-education of the people. The first of this problem is that of peace and stability. In FrancAfrique of the old school, development and the well-being of the people is secondary to their so-called "Peace and Stability". When civilians protest against the myopic economic and social policies of the regimes in question, they are swiftly brought in front of a Kangaroo court, arraigned and jailed. A typical case in point is the jailing of a popular Cameroonian and international music artist, Lapiro de Mbanga. He is languishing in jail for no apparent reason but that he had been writing and singing songs pertaining to the social ills of the present Cameroon regime, infamously one of the most corrupt in the world.

Peace and stability must be earned through accountability of a government; and the incorruptibility of the judiciary. The opposite is true in the world of the present regime. Last week, the Supreme Court of Cameroon upheld the incarceration of Lapiro, claiming he incited the 2008 food riots. One begins to wonder whether Lapiro and other civilians who were killed or are in rat-infested unhealthily diseased dungeons must be at blame for the lack of vision of a 27 year old tyranny and disgraceful mismanagement. With one of the most fertile volcanic soils in the world, Cameroon has the potential to be the food basket for the entire West and Central Africa. Yet, that is not the case.

Apparently, there are no sustainable food policies; and that most imported food stuff are heavily taxed to pay for the good life of the French whose government take their cut in cash or in kind. While the elite have unaccountable and inviolable access to their loot in the treasury --they live in luxury like in France -- the poor are dependent on their various relatives in Europe and the Americas for monetary handouts. There is a problem here: because those living abroad will hardly garner enough financial critical mass to compete with their peers in their host countries. It is no doubt, at this point of overwhelming forbearance, that many well-educated and upright Cameroonians are now turning into financial white collar crimes to augment their incomes abroad while at the same time support the neglected destitute at home.

The counter-part African who stays behind is also in a timeless dragnet of beggary as the regime is firmly intent on "Peace and stability" with no responsibility. In this case, therefore, the people are psychologically demoralised; and since only a genuinely motivated population can muster enough energy to uplift a country from the doldrums of economic and social mutilation, there is very little expectation but stagnation and retrogression into the Dark Age.

It has to be recalled that Western Europe was deep in the Dark Ages for 1000 years. During this period, intellectual dynamism was discouraged by the authority of the day, dissent was brutally put down, diseases; such as the Bubonic plague wiped out a third of the population, food shortages were rampant; and wars were the order of the day; barbarians were on the match while the moral fabric of the society disintegrated. How they managed to reverse the tide of barbarism, greed, oppression, mis-education and disease is unclear. Nevertheless, if one may extrapolate or interpolate from their society today, it seems the only way they pulled it from the fire was to hold their leaders into account. Those who failed to account were unceremoniously thrown out in disgrace or punished as the system saw fit.

This writer believes that the ancient system of accountability is still in place today in Europe; and may account for the continuance to peace and prosperity. Not so, in FrancAfrique where there is "Peace" and no prosperity. This brings us to the question as to whether there can be peace without prosperity. The conjecture is that one cannot live without the other concept. Where there is no prosperity, there is no peace; and where there is no peace prosperity must not follow.