An Albatross in the Cameroons

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 18^th 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 21^st Century Trilogy of Essays Book 2.