Mouafo Pierre: Man of plural beauty passes on

Following the launching of the SDF in 1990, two categories of people signed up to join the party: a few that were convinced social democrats, and the majority whose only conviction was a feeling of unease and a desire for change.

Mouafo Pierre, Bamboutos Divisional Chief of Elections Cameroon (ELECAM) who died in Yaounde on 25 February 2015, was one of those who joined the party as a convinced social democrat.

He became a member of the SDF in May 1990 and was voted Secretary of the SDF in Bamboutos. He later became provincial secretary of the SDF in the West, and then co-opted member of NEC.

Indeed, when I became Secretary General of the party in 1994, I met him in NEC as a co-opted member with the specific duty of recording minutes, having been given that role by my predecessor Siga Asanga to fulfill one of the functions of the SG of taking NEC minutes or causing them to be taken.

I found him to be bilingual, highly talented, opinionated and principled, so we forged a friendship which grew stronger and stronger over the years until his demise on 25 February 2015.

The first wave of people like Mouafo that joined the party after its launching was followed by another wave of what I can call situational converts that joined the party around election time in 1996/1997 to negotiate their investiture as candidates of the party for councils and parliament.

Most were retired civil servants with the imprimatur of “experience,” and used the wealth they had accumulated to buy influence and relationships that made fairness and impartiality suddenly strange to those in the investiture committee!

The new entrants saw fellow militants not as thinking humans but as props and raw material for their power games. They turned the congenial atmosphere of solidarity and purpose that existed in the party to adversarial. This was especially the case in Bamboutos Division that was the political base of Mouafo.

To achieve their goals, the situational converts quickly entered into an internal struggle with Mouafo and other stalwarts who had braved police batons, tear gas, bullets and all sorts of inhuman treatment, right from the birth of the party.

All strategies to emerge victorious in this struggle were good enough: political intrigues, backdoor plots, blackmail, disagreements, gossip, barratry or the groundless stirring up of disciplinary procedures… Because of the overwhelming influence bought by the situational converts, they completely dominated the stalwarts and emerged victorious in the 1996 council and 1997 parliamentary elections.

However, in 2002, Mouafo used hard work, militancy and organizational prowess to trump the so-called “experience,” financial strength and manipulative tactics that had set him aside in 1997; he won the primaries.

Unfortunately, he was frustrated by the investiture committee of the SDF that colluded with the losers to position them in the SDF list, putting Mouafo virtually at the tail of the list, mainly because they did not want him to be elected MP! The SDF ended up losing every seat! It was like saying that it was better to lose all seats than let Mouafo go to parliament!

At the height of this in-fighting in the party, there was so much bad blood, with some people specializing in politicizing every action, and indulging in blame games, peddling conspiracy theories, and circulating sentimental and bigoted opinions.

It is within that context that a series of articles appeared in The Post Newspaper titled “Gigantic conspiracy against Fru Ndi,” in which perceived Fru Ndi opponents in the party were castigated with claims.

For example, the following was said of Mouafo: “Fru Ndi used to walk into coalition meetings and would be greeted by everybody except the Assistant Permanent Secretary Mouafo, who was also his Assistant Secretary General. ..

I had no quarrel with the way people voted (at the SDF convention), except for the fact that some people who supported other candidates against Fru Ndi, refused to support his candidature when he emerged as the party’s candidate for 2004 presidential election…A typical example was the then Assistant Secretary General of the party, Pierre Mouafo. He publicly declared that he did not campaign for anybody…

It must be added here that Mouafo fled to Yaounde from Mbouda under very dubious circumstances… and did “a swap” with someone in Yaounde, who wanted a transfer to Mbouda. Who was that someone and where in Mbouda does he teach and where in Yaounde does Mouafo teach? Ever since his dismissal from the SDF… he is persistently sent to insult the SDF in local radio stations (and he is) provocatively brought to party circles…”

Mouafo reacted to these innuendoes in a letter to the Editor of The Post Newspaper as follows: “… concerning my ‘escapade’ to Yaounde…after I successfully obtained a “DEA” in Letters in 1987, I left Yaounde and went and settled in Mbouda to carry out research for my Doctoral degree.

The choice of Mbouda was dictated by the moral debt I owed to “Collège de l’Unité”, where I did my secondary education. I taught French in the institution from 1987 to 1991, while teaching part-time bilingual training in the Faculty of Science of the then lone University of Yaounde up to 1993. The struggle for change met me in the field, and God knows how much I put in the struggle, including sacrificing my future and that of my entire family! …”

Mouafo continued the letter as follows: “In 2002, I sold my lone house that I had just finished building in Mbouda to fund my Legislative campaign. Unfortunately, our chances were ruined not only by the partial spirit of the Chairman and the Investiture Committee in drawing up the SDF list for Bamboutos, but also by the duplicity of some of my colleagues on the list.

These weaknesses and the Bamenda Peace Pact caused the CPDM to win in all the villages of Bamboutos during the by-election of September 2002, except in my village and in the Mbouda Urban Centre. It is in this condition of disillusionment that I left Mbouda in October 2002 to Yaounde, in search of better pastures…I was not an employee of the SDF transferred to teach in Mbouda.

I am a fighter, who is struggling honestly, everyday, to make ends meet. For five years now, I have been a proprietor of a small enterprise that sells various types of services; I am also a founder of a polyvalent school in Mbouda since 1991…. The time for presenting the leader, as a demi-god who catches bullets is long past. We have entertained this illusion for so long, and we all know where it has taken the SDF and Cameroon….”

Mouafo was of “Bamileke” extraction. The general feeling within the “Bamileke” circles in the SDF was that they were not well represented in the higher echelons, in spite of their overall strength in the party.

This is why following the election in 1996 of Soub Lazare as Mayor of Douala 3 and his subsequent destitution by the SDF, there were jittery reactions from some “Bamilekes” in the SDF as manifested by the activities of Christophe Takoudjou in Cameroon and Paul Yamga in France.

An anonymous memo to the National Chairman on the 10th anniversary of the party, a copy of which was sent to me, painted the situation some years later as follows: “You have no respect for any tribe other than your own and you insult every tribe whenever you have the opportunity.

How many times have we heard you say: ‘These Bamilekes are the greediest people I ever met, they want to confiscate my party and hold me hostage, never!’…?”

In general, any effort by the “Bamilekes” to form any reflection group in the party was considered as an effort to create a “Bamileke Front” as a strategy to take over the party. An atmosphere of rivalry, fear and confusion was instituted within them, and each reported to “hierarchy,” the ‘suspicious’ activities of the other and so rendered themselves powerless! What can be described as the “hatred” of “hierarchy” for Mouafo was generated mainly by such baseless reports from within the group.

In the build-up to the 1999 Yaounde Convention which was the first elective convention to since 1991 when NEC was elected in the first convention, the Bamileke circles in the SDF hoped to gain entrance into the “Presidency” of the party by providing one of the National Vice Presidents. However, following initial polling for various posts, the “Bamilekes” did not win any of the targeted posts.

A delegation of the West led by Mouafo and others went to the re-elected National Chairman to protest against the lack of consideration, mainly because they were aware of the existence of what was known as the Chairman’s list of preferred people to be elected into NEC. Mouafo was eventually elected to the post of 1st Vice SG against a preferred candidate of Fru Ndi’s, due to the massive mobilization of the West delegation for his candidature.

Later in the voting process, the West seemed to have got its act together and was performing strongly and grabbing powerful commission posts. Interestingly, the sub-committee for the elections reacted by no longer announcing the results of the votes as required by the electoral process. In protest, Mouafo ordered the West delegation to walk out, and it did. This led to a stalemate which was only resolved by the announcement of the results that showed that Tsessue had beaten Nfor; Nanda had beaten Gumne; and Kale had beaten Njiwah.

Mouafo, like many other members of the SDF eventually left the party feeling betrayed. I recently read in a write-up by Provincial Chairman Martin Yembe that “a special commission dubbed Peace and Reconciliation Commission has been put in place in the SDF, headed by Dr. John Mancho to, not do a repeat of the masquerade of 2004.”

Interestingly, I was at the centre of what is here dubbed “the masquerade of 2004” with Mouafo as the able 1st Assistant Secretary General. What I can say is that what was done in 2004 was supposed to be part and parcel of a reconciliation process composed of many steps; the reconciliation conference was just a first step!

One just needs to check the next steps taken by the leadership of the party, including the blackmail that surrounded Mouafo’s exit from the party in 2005 to understand why the reconciliation turned out to be a “masquerade.” Good people like Dr. Mancho, whatever they do, can only negotiate the first step. The final outcome will always depend on the next steps taken after that first step!

Prince Mouafo Pierre was born in 1961 in Bafounda to the Paramount Chief of Bafounda. The testimonies and eulogies at his burial in Bafounda on Saturday 14 March left no doubt that he was a man of all seasons. He lived Immanuel Kant’s saying that beauty is plural; it is not given once and for all but can be created anew and differently. Mouafo knew how to create beauty wherever he set his foot. I have no doubt that he will continue to create beauty following his sunset here on earth and his sunrise in his next sphere of existence.