Cacophony as governance strategy!

A few months ago, I made the point that Cameroon is adrift. The aimlessness is the result of persistent anti populist decisions taken by government leaving those with any sense of discernment to surmise that our governing class, including the head of state, is totally out of touch with reality. There is ample proof to uphold to this assertion.

Indeed, there is no denying the fact that over the past years especially, since the advent of political pluralism, Cameroon has drifted from a country that initially exhibited clear signs of determination to emerge and be counted among well governed and prosperous countries in the comity of nations to its current state of indescribable economic, social and political lethargy.

Issuing from the above, governance is now being reduced to something akin to a Manor Lord in medieval Europe lording it over his serfs, with President Biya being the Manor Lord and Cameroonians his serfs.

With parliament cowed through executive highhandedness and arm-twisting bribery and judiciary reduced to messengers of the president of the republic who appoints magistrates and superintends their actions, there is no means to promote actions that inveigh against executive excesses.

Justice no longer reflects impartiality as appointments to the bench or legal department have been commercialised and in the quest to recoup what was spent in the process of landing juicy jurisdictions, magistrates have had recourse to unorthodox methods of dispensing justice including receiving bribes and using underhand methods to acquire property from desperate litigants.

As we were about to go to bed (technical expression for going to print) I received a call from my lawyer friend who was sup-posed to be having a quiet time in the USA. The substance of our conversation was uneasiness that had suddenly gripped him.

The cause; after we had managed to swallow the issue of poor legal architecture that characterises the penal code bill passed into law recently, he was informed by one of his colleagues of the local front that it is clear that some patent fraud is being perpetrated by Laurent Esso and his boys in the Ministry of Justice.

There is incontrovertible evidence to the effect that the draft bill submitted to parliament is very different from that which emerged over the 2011 confab that assigned the Bar Council the task of making suggestion for improvement of the penal code.

Barrister Etta Bissong, Bar Council President as he then was, has cried foul and the Bar Council is determined to lay bare the two versions for public consumption. Oh, what a shame!

All of this is done just to prove to Biya that they are more Cameroonian than the rest of us. Esso, even had the effrontery to lambast the Bar Council over palpable tardiness and even failure to carry out their assignment.

There are only two possibilities here. Either some-body in the ministry of justice has pulled a fast one at his minister to make him look foolish or Esso, is an outright liar.

At the level of parliament, rubberstamping has become its hallmark, complemented by hand-clapping. With the amorphous notion that parliamentarians are elected by a constituency but work for the entire nation, it is difficult to hold them accountable for their stewardship.

This already unfortunate situation is aggravated by the fact that through some obvious but invidious reasons bordering on outright rigging and gerrymandering, the CPDM has a crushing majority in parliament.

This majority, leaning on the nefarious party discipline dogma ensures that whatever comes from CPDM led government sails through parliament and eventually becomes law even as deep down individual consciences it is clear that many of such bills passed into law are travesty to parliamentary decorum.

A barefaced example of such thoughtlessness is the recent bill on the new penal code that was surreptitiously submitted by government and passed into law by parliament.

Such unbridled disposition to kow-tow to the whims of the executive arm of government exemplifies aptly the pigheadedness that characterizes our parliament.

This is happening against the backdrop of presence of trained and practicing lawyers within the ranks of the constitutional law committee that examined the admissibility of the bill and the plenary that passed it into law.

Even more embarrassing is the fact that objections raised by the Bar Council relating to the poor legal architecture that envelope the bill submitted to the minister of justice and keeper of the seal for onward transmission to parliament and the presidency of the republic.

Not only did Laurent Esso fail to forward the proposals, but more importantly he endorsed the passage into law of a doctored version different from what he inherited from his predecessor Ahmadou Ali.

Four main examples suffice to illuminate the levity with which issues of national concern are handled in parliament. The first has to do with article 127 that grants immunity to serving ministers. This is happening at a time when Kondengui prison is awash with alleged embezzlers.

What an innovative way to encourage pilfering from the public till! The second is article 32 that prescribes criminalization of debts emanating from unpaid house rents; ordinarily, a purely civil matter.

This is not only draconian but more significantly, it flies in the face of justice in a system that is known to pay very low salaries to workers and weighs in as support to land lords most of whom are civil servants and businessmen who have built their houses from money stolen or unjustly received from questionable contracts. The third stems from article 18 that prescribes death penalty to some crimes.

While not condoning criminality in any form, it is important to shine a light on the fact that Cameroon is signatory to many international conventions including that which proscribes death penalty as punishment.

As bad and repugnant as some of these articles may seem , the opprobrium that they radiate is not half as denigrating to our corporate image as a country as the approximate translation of the bill in English. This is a clear reflection of the levity that encapsulates our approach to national issues.

Moreover, given that our constitution is unequivocal on the bi-cultural and bi-jural nature of our country based on the different backgrounds that underpinned our unification in 1961, the current bill on penal code invokes feelings of betrayal and brazen effrontery to Anglophones. How would we handle interpretations of articles that con-note and denote different things in English and French?

Yet, we will be expected to use them in courts in the same country! While admitting that it is important to forge a common destiny, such consideration ought not to lead to a situation wherein, a component of the two cultures that inhere in the state Cameroon would feel unwanted.

If the current leadership is weary, they should concede redundancy and make way for those who embrace the philosophy of a Cameroon that will align its governance with the dictates of 21st century modernism and globalisation.