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Louis Egbe Mbua
Never, since the
formation of the defunct Cameroon Federation in 1961, has there been such a
growing generation of curiosity and euphoria by four rapid letters in
succession. Had it been love letters for a long lost Casanova to his damsel in
the land of utopia, it would have created a different kind of fantasia in the
imaginations of the populace: if, on the
other hand, it were a single letter conjured up to fire a company director from
a renown multinational, a different sort of phantasmal excitement will again be
expected but a great expectation all the same. One can quickly recall,
summoning at lightning speed, periods at one’s teenage years when a silly student’s
love letter was caught by the college Principal who would proceed to announce
and then move forward to promptly read it up aloud in front of a curious bunch
of fresh-faced love non-starters: who would be waiting, anxiously, and fully alert for the juicy parts to be
serialised so as to burst out into a fit
of uncontrollable laughter while the supposed culprit would watch in total helplessness
and fright on the stage with his eyes
firmly glued to the floor.
Mr. Marafa Hamidou Yaya
is no small student or is he a small time office clerk working in the Buea
Council in Cameroon. A Cameroonian and USA trained geologist and engineer, he
had scaled the heights of his engineering profession by sheer raw talent,
worked as an oil man, transformed into a respected oil executive in Cameroon
and then morphed into a top flight politician with the clout and position as
Secretary General at the Cameroon Presidency, and latterly as Minister of
Interior. How he did it is any one’s guess. All that may be gleaned from his
biography is that he did it with easy panache. That, however, is not the point
of this essay. The main focus is that he was promptly arrested without warning
in the national capital Yaoundé, together with Chief Ephraim Inoni, the former
Cameroon Prime Minister, who was quietly living off his retirement in his
native coastal village of Bakingili near Victoria, Cameroon; and performing his
functions as the local Chieftain.
According to reliable
reports, both former African big men were summoned to Yaoundé, to answer questions relating to or directly
connected to what has now been aliased as the Albatross Affair. The intricacies
and twists of the matter have been diagnosed and documented by many renowned
writers, and so will not be fully sermonised in this expose. Nevertheless, a
fast-paced précis will add much needed Indian spice in the cooking of the story
to be followed by the books for exotic and exquisite taste on this complex of
state matters.
Accordingly, President Biya
of Cameroon wanted a Presidential Aeroplane for his own and family personal use.
Unfortunately for the seemingly politically sweet-toothed or power-spoiled Mr.
Biya, the IMF had imposed tight restrictions on the rumoured and evident Cameroon
squandamania as a trade off for
Cameroon to qualify as a Heavily Indebted Country Status (HIC). It is with
irony, and the wringing of the hands for one to make a note that Chief Inoni
was the architect of this Cameroonian “rescue” plan as Cameroon was on the
verge of total bankruptcy due to years of the Biya regime’s gross mismanagement
and gross corruption. That is another story.
Anyway, Biya had other ideas. Following our thread, Biya sort a cunning
and illegally irregular plan to go ahead and purchase the luxury jet in breach
of this international economic compromise agreement.
Knowing full well his
usurped dictatorial powers, he grafted the defunct Cameroon Airlines (CamAir)
to do the ignominious task so as to evade detection by the international body.
In a further complex dictatorial manoeuvre he ordered the state-owned Cameroon
Hydrocarbon Company, La Societe Nationale d'Hydro-carburant (SNH) to stump up for the plane, further covering
his gaming tracts. Trouble is that those responsible or given the task to
purchase or procure the aircraft or both appeared not to have understood the
great act of deception by Le Grand
Sorcier de la politique (GSP). As a result, the entire project was bungled
with corrupt officials having a field day with more than $31 million sent
directly to the “manufacturing agent” abroad (the story is so full of complex
webs of lies and deceit that nobody can quite decipher exactly who is the
manufacturer or agent or both) by the SNH to buy the plane. The “project” was
so badly executed so much so that Biya ended up with a second hand or third
hand (nobody quite knows to this day at
to whether it was an actual plane or a
converted 18th century Zeppelin balloon) aircraft.
The interesting matter
here is that it was not immediately obvious as to the state and mechanical
conditions of the Albatross since it was given a good coat of metallic paint,
so it was said. The machine had very little difference with the fake disguised
tanks used by the allied forces to deceive Hitler into bombing an empty paper
tank. Whatever the case, Biya and his family appeared to be very pleased with
the “results”; well, not until the Albatross “aircraft” took to the air. From preliminary
“technical” reports from the media, it seems the aircraft took off but
immediately had intractably serious problems flying and staying in the air.
With the President and his entire family in the Albatross, there are rumours of
Biya and his family entering into a fit of fright, intermittent panic attacks and massive hysteria because it seems the
plane was about to plummet onto the ground like a huge savage stone. What would
have happened to the Albatross and the fate of the passengers if, by some cruel
poetic orison, the Albatross hit the ground in its shaking rage with a
deafening bang nobody can quite tell. With a stroke of good luck, the able
Captain managed to control and land the “aircraft”. There began the strange and
scandalous Albatross Affair.
Now, Mr. Biya claims Marafa
and Chief Inoni were fully responsible for the “hold-up” or hijack of public
money “set aside” for the doomed aircraft, and that they are outright embezzlers
or that they planned to finish him off complete with his family, depending on
whose story is to be believed and whose side one takes. Who, exactly, is the
culprit on top of the stage with his eyes permanently glued onto the floor?
Marafa has washed his hands and says it is not him. Chief Inoni also denied any
involvement in the scandal by staying mute. So who stole the $31 million from
the SNH? That is the first port of call in the source of the Marafa letters.
There are so far four
letters released by Marafa which can be considered as the CamMarafa Scandals. These letters are widely circulated in the internet
thus I will not belabour the reader with its details. However, the crunch
summary of the matter is that Marafa stated clearly that he had nothing to do with the transfer of $31million abroad in connection with the acquisition of the
Albatross; and that the transactions were done in violation of normal and official working practice of the Cameroon
government which conduct state matters by means of letters of credit. In
another separate missive, he decried lack of consultations with the recent electoral
reform Laws in Cameroon; and that he clearly advised Biya to step down, and not
to stand again in the 2011 Presidential elections; he was opposed, he stated,
to the altering of the constitution to eliminate term limits in 2008 that gave
Biya a free reign to transform himself illegally into a life President against
the consent of the Cameroon people. He went further by stating that he opposed
an “inherited” Presidency since Biya was planning to create a position of a
Vice President that would take over the Presidency after he “leaves”. Most
poignantly, he called for his own fair trial before a competent judge since he
dismissed the original judge who recommended his incarceration as “corrupt”. He
questioned Biya’s judgement for appointing incompetent ministers who display
amazing tepidity and incomprehension in executing state functions while
reporting that Biya replied that “not all minsters were actually “ministers””.
Finally, Marafa claims
to have a “democratic“ plan; and an objective
for future and prosperous Cameroon, then went on, in some kind of political
bravado, to openly challenge his accusers to either produce or conjure up their
own plan. Nobody quite knows the exact content of the Marafa “plan”.
Nevertheless, his intrepid and politically damaging actions may indicate that
his road maps and objectives fall under the heading of the revolutionary. This
perfectly mirrors his present actions as what he is undertaking, at the moment,
is nothing short of direct confrontation with the status quo as an insider. His
rivals –if we may call them as such – so far, have failed to produce any
meaningful “counter” plan for the
country with a clear vision save pitiful photshopped
graphical illustrations of a possible mirage in 2035.
It should be drawn to
the notice of the eminent readers that Marafa is not the first high profile
prisoner to write from the notorious Kondegui prison facility in Yaoundé.
However, what gave his correspondences added weight and impetus is that he
directly challenged Biya’s 30 year strangle hold on power and dictatorship. Mr.
Mebara, another incarcerated apparatchik and former Secretary General at the
Presidency who is also allegedly implicated in the comical Albatross uproar
with Biya and the ensuing Brouhaha within the Cameroon press corps appears to
have begun his literary career in prison. Yet, although he was praised for his
soothing style, gripping narratives and ease of words as well as carefully
crafted grammatical terminologies, his was written to solicit a sort of
“pre-condolence” telegram from the self-proclaimed Supreme Magistrat de l’Etat.
The killer bite was palpably not there, the punch de grace noticeably lacking. These correspondences will serve as
excellent historical and social documents for future references, a literary
bonanza for “kongossa” and gossip
champions, a personal testimony, undoubtedly, but at the moment they can
only be viewed as missives of procrastinating entreaties with supine
acquiescence as the moulding block.
In a desperate attempt
to fight back, a calculated move to strike back, at halting the incessant and
vicious attacks from Marafa into the left and right ventricular power flow
lines of the Biya oligarchic jamboree, Professor Fame Ndongo, the Cameroon
Minister of Higher Education, and a CPDM ruling party operator-manipulator
wrote and circulated in the Cameroon press what may pass as a purely
theoretical philosophical academic “rebuttal” of the Marafa letters. As ana
academic treatise, this was of excellent grade. However, as a counter political
guerrilla tactics, it counts for an impecunious zero political capital. While
this served as a necessary distraction for a while, the near convoluted
disquisition that quoted medieval philosophers was totally devoid of iron teeth
to bite the increasingly accelerating intellectual bullets from the firing stun
gun of the Marafa pen. Instead of even slowing down the momentous political contours
that these events were carving in the landscape of the Cameroon dramatic scene,
the Fame Ndongo rebuttal rather added more impetus to further attract the Chariot of the Gods to dispatch more
fire and dark smoke through vents that penetrate into the very foundations of
the Cameroons lands.
Late in July 2012,
Marafa appeared in court in Yaoundé together with his Chief Attorney Professor
Kofele-Kale. Dressed in a crisped and well-pressed suit that seemingly resemble
a tailored couture cut out by a skilled hand in Saville Row, London, he
proffered a tentative “Presidential” wave to the crowd who had jammed the court
area as well as lining the street to see him. The crowd didn’t disappoint. In a
spontaneous move to return his felicitous accolade, the 10,000 strong crowds
boomed back in an unmistakably unanimous stanza: “Bienvenue notre President”. Seeing the scene in pictures takes the
motion of a compelling premonition in moving images as in a silent movie.
Reminisces of biblical similitude completes the chorus:
Saul
has slain all his one thousand;
The
girded one has his tens of thousands
Saul
came, did not see, empty went
The
people came, saw and fear conquered
The
Albatross has come to stay,
An
Albatross ‘round their necks strung
What
is in there for the millions?
Extracted from the forth coming Book: A 21st Century Trilogy of Essays Book 2.
