Mr. President, stop the conspiracy against your democratic legacy!

What hides behind the commonplace of the incident of shame in Yaounde last week, is pregnant with extraordinary meaning. That police violently disrupted an opposition press conference in the Yaounde IV District,is strikingly preposterous at this kink of our democratic dispensation.

Banal as it maybe, that ignominious show is a dangerous sabotage of the people’s freedom in the so-called advanced democracy. The incident is once more a tacit betrayal of Cameroon as a dreaded dictatorship in democratic garments. It is a pointer to the fact that our self-acclaimed democratic status is also a farce with a mask of hidden dictatorial fangs.

Yet, spin doctors of the regime use the most superlative hyperboles to tell the world in a flow of clumsy grandiloquence how Cameroon is a country that respects basic freedoms.

Indeed, two hypotheses make them right. They maybe right if the freedom they are talking about was designed only for the ruling CPDM party and its barons.

They may not also be gainsaid if there is another Cameroon else where other than the one we wallow in now or if they are talking about another Cameroon in the abstract world lodged in the bowels of their unpatriotic mindscape.

Let truth be told here; that no amount of incense can kill the smell of decay. By that same token, no amount of whitewashing propaganda from the regime’s song birds can erase the stigma that Cameroon is a dictatorship by blood. Perhaps in their so-called democracy, everybody should be a think-same and act-same robot for the regime.

Otherwise, why should the police stop opposition parties from making a counter declaration when CPDM officials hold rallies almost on a daily basis; calling on the octogenarian President to grab another term of office?
Was it necessary for the police to be brutal and arrest people on an issue as banal as this? These are some of the aberrations that make Cameroon look like the theatre of the absurd in the eyes of the international community.

When newspapers published stories on the ugly incident last Wednesday, the fraternity of the “Free Readers Association, FRA,” that is always in front of a kiosk in the Melen neighbourhood,unleashed a free-for-all cursing of President Paul Biya, quickly judging and sentencing our President in the court of public opinion.

They were right because President Biya told Radio Monte Carlos in the early 90s that he would want to be remembered as the one who brought democracy to Cameroon. One may be tempted to ask the President if this crackdown on freedom of expression is the democracy he promised Cameroonians. The President must be very careful with the numerous sycophants around him, who, in their overzealousness, pretend to be more “royalist” than the King.

They may just be in a conspiracy to rob him of the democratic legacy he promised Cameroonians. Freedom of expression is the bulwark upon which democratic societies are pegged. It is more effervescent when the array of divergent voices crosses swords on issues of national interest. Such a setting is the thermometer for a democratic nation.

The current dark spots constitute a jinx to the hope of a true democratic mutation in Cameroon. They seem to be fulfilling the prophecy of the April 6, 1984 botched coup. Its leader, IssaAdoum, had warned that the Biya regime was taking Cameroon down the abyss of one of the bleakest periods in history.

Two years later, precisely in 1986, the economic crisis struck, leaving Cameroon in permanent pecuniary asphyxia. Since then, measure after measure and structural adjustment after structural adjustment have failed to redeem the situation because of bad governance.

Every patriotic Cameroonian in his right frame of mind should condemn the April 6 coup with all his/her might.

Yet, its silver lining is that the coup plotters had a sense of clairvoyance and saw far into the future of the country. Their predictions came to pass. Although April 6 carries a stigma of a day in which the Second Republic was almost smothered, it is a memorable day for ace journalist, Antoine Marie Ngono.

While Yaounde suffocated under artillery gunfire, the celebrated journalist was busy tying the nuptial knots with his wife in one of the neighbourhoods in the city. Imbued with a deep sense ofhumour, Antoine Marie Ngono told colleagues recently that his wedding was unique because it was saluted by a salvo of over 3000 gunshots.

Away from this comic relief digression, I make bold to tell Mr President that the current suppression of fundamental freedoms is more of a security risk than Boko Haram. The environment is already a potentiallyexplosive situation in which citizens are gnawed by abject poverty.

Mr President, imagine a situation in which you are poor and are denied the opportunity to say at least that you are hungry. Again, imagine a situation in which somebody gives you snake beatings and stops you from crying. Taking away freedom of expression is the worst thing that can be done to citizens choking with numerous grievances.

Take nothing for granted sir, even if the suffering masses of this county wallow in docility and the perennial ritual of wound-licking as well as the trading of scars. The celebrated Chinua Achebe said it sir, that no ruler, no matter how powerful he is, can win a war against his people. By extension, no ruler, no matter how Machiavellian he is, can succeed to cow all the people into submission all the time.

The one time celebrated columnist of the Time Magazine, Lance Morrow, once described African leaders as armed robbers that the people must chase away. Such leaders, he went on, are the reason for pervasive political and economic corruption in Africa.

He pooh-poohed the claim that African leaders can fight corruption and bring democracy and prosperity to their various countries. The columnist disagreed with the banal cliché that it is better to send a thief to catch a thief. He said people in African countries strive in corruption because they have no qualms “robbing a robber”.

But our very handsome President can stand miles away from this madding crowd of corrupt presidents in Morrow’s column. And this can be possible only when he listens to the music of reason and the milk of human kindness in him. It is also possible if he listens to the melody of the legacy that he promised to bequeath posterity.

Mr. President can also do this by giving a kind of Daniel-like judgement to declarations of self-seeking sycophants who pretend to love him more than his better half, Chantal. It was certainly out of this insincere love and the lingo of falsehood that the Divisional Officer for Yaounde IV, Martin LockoMotassi,cracked down on the opposition press conference.

The same situation holds sway for the administrator who banned people from sympathising with Boko Haram victims at the Muna Foundation last Thursday.

Stop this, Mr. President, because such people are apparently part of the conspiracy to rob you of the democratic legacy you promised Cameroonians.
Mr President, graciously hear us!