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Cameroon: In the Emperor's Mindset
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The Post (Buea)
OPINION
22 February 2008
Posted to the web 22 February 2008
Chief Charles A. Taku
On February 11, President Paul Biya confirmed what many pundits had discerned from his speeches in the past.
Like his rendition, his speeches have persistently become incoherent and meaningless. Hidden behind this unstable mindset, however, one can perceive fear; a lot of fear indeed.
Fear, it is said, is a dictator's nightmare.
Fear of thinking that like all mortals death may come calling at a time and hour unknown; fear of losing power under unpredictable circumstances; fear that those proclaiming him God on earth and urging him to stage a constitutional coup d'état may actually be the ones plotting his demise.
In the above frame of mind, therefore, Paul Biya delivered the wrong message to the wrong audience. In his so-called address to the youths, he purported to condemn the use of force by patriotic Chadians who have taken up arms in an attempt to topple a fellow dictator who, like Biya, desecrated the sovereign will of his country people by removing term limits from the Chadian constitution; thus ensuring a life presidency for himself.
Biya is conscious of the fact that amongst those who have joined forces in an attempt to topple the French stooge, Idriss Deby, from power, are sycophants who cheered him on when he crafted and implemented the crimes against the sovereign will of his own people.
Like the traitors and turncoats passing for CPDM militants leading the crusade for his externalisation of power today, some of those who have taken up arms against Biya's co-French vassal, Deby, were his closest allies.
But what actually prompted Biya to revisit the scenario of a coup d'état, though in another country, in a public speech not on April 6 but on February 11? Why had he to import the Chadian scenario into a seemingly unrelated event? The answer lies in Biya's tacit acknowledgement of the truth in two domains.
The first is the justifiable perception that after the constitutional coup d'état he is plotting, he does not know for sure how and when he would be compelled to quit. Behind this lies the fact that the so-called peace he has presented to the world to justify the political crimes perpetuated on the polity and the citizenry is no peace at all.
Houphouet Boigny before him portrayed Ivory Coast in similar terms and for the same reasons. The end-product of such false peace is there for all to see. La République du Cameroun for the same reasons must not be an exception.
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The second is a veiled message to the enslaved masses and youths of the Southern Cameroons whom he is aware may not accept the situation of serfdom that goes with a brutal annexation. Thus, to his mind, it was necessary in that incoherent speech to enjoin them not to imitate the Chadian youths in their attempt to expel the oppressor and his agents from their territory.
Whatever Biya intended by confounding the Chadian people the primary target of his speech with the youths of another country, one reading of the rigmarole is that the emperor has finally found his match.
And that match is fear. And fear, I respectfully submit, cannot be wished away. Between fear and Mr. Biya, the purported conqueror and master of time, we will see whom time, true time, will favour.
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