Biya's End Of Year Address: The reflections of the Agbaw-Ebai Debate

In his end of year address to the nation, President Paul Biya once more acknowledged critical failings in his thirty-two year visionless reign. The main casualty of this visionless reign is a rudderless divided polity mired in a storm of dire political, economic and socio-cultural problems.

The President purported to address three critical issues confronting the nation but avoided some altogether. He finally addressed the nation on the state of war that the nation is confronting. This is the first time he has formally informed Cameroonians in a national address that the country is at war.

He declared the ongoing war against Boko Haram while on a visit to France, Cameroon’s erstwhile UN trust administrator which in violation of the trust colonized the territory and perpetrated one of the unacknowledged genocides in modern history.

In its campaign to suppress the nationalist demands for immediate independence, crimes that shock the conscience of humanity, war crimes and genocide were perpetrated by France. The ghost of that genocidal campaign is at the root of many of the problems afflicting this nation; begging for an urgent redress. Declaring the war against Boko Haram from France, whose neo-colonial policies are held accountable for the current state of instability was humiliating.

That disregard for national sovereignty and national pride has so far inhibited the mobilization of the country in time of need to fight a common enemy. The definition of the enemy against whom the national army is deployed has been tenuous and confusing betraying an attempt to hide the true identity of the enemy.

The Presidential address made a confusing attempt at long last to identify the enemy, this time by inference only. The President appealed to our Moslem brothers not to perceive the war as a war against a religion. In context, this appeal relates to the Moslem population of Cameroon; implying an admission that some of them are participating in the war.

However, it is reasonable to infer that were the argument not made that the war targeted Moslem on account of their faith; the President would not have made that appeal addressing them on the specific allegation.

It is therefore safe to conclude that an Islamic motivation for the war has been identified by the President. In making this argument, the President gave tacit credit to his spokesman Isa Tchiroma who publicly disclosed that jobless youth from the North were lured to train to join the war. Only last week Cameroon announced that a training Camp was found in Cameroonian territory and several weeks government troops announced the arrest of a mayor of an important frontier outpost between Cameroon and Nigeria allegedly for being members of Boko Haram.

Additionally, the propensity of the President of Cameroon to order the payment of ransom for the release of abducted foreign nationals, a policy he reiterated in his address is a credible indicia that Cameroon may be a critical battlefront for the recruitment, finance, training and support of the war effort of a confederation of aggrieved combatants fighting to advance distinct interest from different countries within the sub region. An anxious reading of the Presidential address confirms this fact.

In the case of Cameroon, although invariably presented as a war against terrorists, so-called Boko Haram, we can safely conclude that the war is Cameroonian wedged by Cameroonians against the government of Cameroon for reasons that may be political. That the President failed to comprehensively admit this fact is disappointing.

The war declared from Paris raised critical questions about the rationale and relevance of the French-Cameroon Military Cooperation treaty. The immediacy, ferocity and brutality with which the French invoked and executed this treaty in the past against nationalists who were agitating for the independence of Cameroun is now called into question by its near indifference towards the ongoing war.

This has not been the case when the need to pay ransom which the President spoke about, to these supposed nebulous enemy, known as terrorists in public and combatants at night is concerned. Does this war advance or threaten the interest of France in the sub region? The answer to this question may be inferred from the Presidential address. He praised a number of countries for assisting Cameroon in its war effort but declined to address the details of such cooperation.

Deferring the details of the assistance provided to help Cameroon’s war effort may mislead only uninformed observers of French neo-colonial politics in its African supposedly former colonies. In the context of the ongoing war(s) in which Cameroon is involved, the conduct of France must be discerned from a sub-regional perspective.

Of significance in this evaluation is the initial undeclared participation of Cameroon in the war in Central Africa Republic as a proxy of the France. When the government of former President Bozize was threatened by a coalition of rebel forces, Cameroon was one of the countries that sent in its military to check the advance of the rebels towards Bangui the capital of the Central Africa Republic. The deployment of Cameroonian forces under those circumstances was a declaration of war for all purposes and intents for which the nation should have been informed by the President who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

Deploying the Armed Forces out of the national boundaries to participate in military operations, no matter the capacity without informing the nations was an egregious violation of the Constitution. The French, Americans, the British, Nigerians, Kenyans and almost all sovereign countries cannot deploy their soldiers in combat without their respective Presidents informing their nations.

Doing so in the case of Central Africa Republic, had consequences in international law of armed conflict as well serious geo-political ramifications. Some of these ramifications have come to haunt and are tormenting the soul of the nation; threatening to escalate the armed conflict within the nation’s boundaries.

Admitted or not, the war in the North of Cameroon, must be analyzed from the wider perspective that there exist a connection between militants from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Central African Republic participating in that war. The militants or combatants, no matter how called, come from the same militant base and are trained and armed to fight the same political battles.

The French know this by their involvement in the battles in Chad, Central African Republic and their military fiat to intervene in Cameroon under the neo-colonial military cooperation agreement that allows it to superintend military and security operations in Cameroon.

This explains why, the Lake Chad Basin Commission Treaty whose security provisions allow member states to cooperate in facing security threats to member states, it took the intervention and permission of France for Cameroon to accept to cooperate with Nigeria militarily to combat the sub-regional threats that armed militants loosely called Boko Haram posed to the sovereignty and security of these countries.

To the extent that initially, it was not just an internal armed conflict threatening the pro-French regime in power, France saw no immediate reason to invoke its military agreement to proclaim its intervention. . No matter from whatever perspective one looks at the conduct of France, the ongoing war serves a critical purpose. It keeps competing economic interests in the sub-region at bay while France organizes its political and economic stranglehold and monopoly over its economic interests in the sub region.

It is preposterous for the President to identify militants from Central Africa Republic whom it had deployed armed forces on an operational adventure to the country and with whom it had conducted negotiations and paid ransoms as bandits. The situation is more complex in that both the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court have characterized the situation in CAR as an armed conflict in which the participants are organized under reasonable command, thus subject to the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War.

In this situation, although Cameroon has not signed the Rome Treaty creating the ICC, its armed forces can still be held accountable for crimes subject to the Rome Statute because CAR is a state party to the Rome Statute. The combatants in CAR are therefore not bandits as the President characterized them.

The address was candid in the admission of failures recorded in the economic domain. The President admitted that the economy relies essentially on the public investment budget to carry out its development policies. This explains in lay terms the state of stagnation and even decline to which the economy is subjected. The President pointed to what must be characterized as a disastrous economic situation confronting the country: a paucity of industries, trade imbalance in which imports significantly outweigh exports, the failing agricultural sector, and a weak investment base.

He failed to state where the money he intends to deploy to realize his three-year emergency investment plan will come from, since it is not in the national budget. Will it be another foreign loan? If this is the case, he failed to address the loan portfolio of the state which is already overburdened by foreign loans with stringent debt servicing conditionality.

On national politics, the President tacitly addressed the Southern Cameroons when he touted the celebration of the 50th anniversary of reunification in Buea in February 2014. He attempted to redefine the event as one of the most critical events in the life of the country. His policy towards the Southern Cameroons over the past 32 years was to suppress the history of the Southern Cameroons and its very existence.

This swift is coming at a time that he is making unusual advances towards leaders of the Southern Cameroons cause in the hope of attenuating perceptible escalating ambers of potential conflict beckoning in the horizon. Mr, Biya is aware that the calculative and relative silence within the territory belies a potential build up and escalation that is capable of putting the sub region on flames at a time Cameroon is assailed from the East and the North. His appointment of Mr Justice Paul Ayah as one of the Advocates Generals of the Supreme Court shortly before this address is seen by observers as a signal towards a major political realignment within the Southern Cameroons.

In the short term, this move prepositions Hon Justice Paul Ayah in a position that directly threatens the Southern Cameroons power elite like Peter Agbor Tabi, Philemon Yang, a number of security, administrative, and many Anglophone stooges who spent their time vilifying and putting the lives and limbs of SCNC leaders and militants at risk for fighting for the respect of international legality towards the Southern Cameroons.

Paul Biya failed to address the war on corruption which is the cancer that is afflicting the nation. The dire economic situation he painted is caused by institutionalized corruption, incept and incompetent administrators and a parasitic political and administrative machinery. He relied on administrators and a plethora of security networks t to sustain his 32 years of misrule.

In his address, he tacitly bemoaned these policies and tacitly holds these categories, accountable for the economic woes which he admitted in his address. In his speech he presented his economic policy as one that reaps where it did not sow, spends money it does not have and Cameroons as a nation of consumers of goods from other countries but lacking the ability to export its own goods for sale abroad.

Lacking support and confidence in government, the private sector seems to have turned its back on Mr. Paul Biya’s political and economic policies as the state relies more and more on ad hoc economic platforms like the three years emergency plan conceived more to make a case for another mandate for Paul Biya come 2018, than to address the economic needs of the citizenry. In the result, this address is more about an individual, his power and policies that have sustained his reign than about a people faced with a destabilizing war which is a direct product of bad policies and irresponsible politics.

The worst aspect of the speech is an attempt to justify a law he alleged is to criminalize terrorism but in effect criminalizes civil liberties. Cameroon declared war against Boko Haram and deployed the army to Central Africa Republic. Both wars are covered by the Geneva Conventions 1949 whose violations are criminalized and punished by clear provisions of the Convention. Cameroon is a state party to the Geneva Conventions.

There was no reason to enact a separate law criminalizing civil liberties to assist the army in the war efforts. There is no independent judiciary to implement the Cameroon legislation. Unlike the cases cited the Cameroon legislation will be enforced by the Military Tribunal. Additionally the death sentence is outlaw by the UN. The mention of the UN is therefore fallacious and mischievous.

The speech is replete with critical admissions of failures wrapped in a flag of deceptive palliatives and recycled promises that have put the nation on its knees. These important admissions of failure would have led to serious consequences. This may not be the case with Cameroon yet again. Mr Biya has in his address identified critical problems, without providing clear sensible solutions. It is left of Cameroonians to seek common sense solutions to these problems.