Although it is often said that the type of leadership a people have is always equal to them, the reverse is even truer in that a leadership that lacks vision can compromise the historical development of its people.

And Southern Cameroons has had its fair share of a visionless leadership.Sometimes it is necessary for a people to stop and observe to be sure whether they are not being enslaved with their own consent. So too is Southern Cameroons. Although Dr. E.M.L. Endeley emerged in 1949 as an incontestable leader of the Southern Cameroons, by sundown of 1961, Endeley was no longer the same person.

He had allowed the British to control his political decisions. And Foncha took advantage of that and became a useful tool in the hands of the French and their local allies in the dishonesty, treachery and falsehood that led to the annexation of the Southern Cameroons by La Republique du Cameroun.

When it comes to the hammering of the historical charter on which a nation should stand, what matters is what the discussants have in mind for the discussion. And there the Southern Cameroons' leadership bungled. They took Fumban for a safari trip. And of course, their Francophone counterparts, led by Ahmadou Ahidjo, demonstrated tact and mastery of the issues, and so carried the day in Fumban.

Even when the post-war reforms provided an opportunity for colonised peoples all over the world to fight for their liberation, the Southern Cameroons leaders opted for a lacklustre approach to politics which consisted largely of the politics of "stop beating me, improve on my condition". We must remember that colonialists had different approaches to achieving the same goal which the Southern Cameroon leadership failed to understand.

Since 1948, the revolutionary agenda of the UPC never changed and a guerrilla war was just one of the options they were forced to adopt after the French outlawed the movement in 1955. Yet, Sam Nuvala Fonkem would want to mislead us into believing that Southern Cameroons produced nationalists (The Post No. 0967). If they did how far did they go?

What vision of society did they articulate that we can build on, today? Sam Nuvala should learn that a nationalist may not only be committed to the ideals of his nation but may also be engaged in the establishment of ideals on which a new nation should stand with its unique language, culture, and structural characteristics free from external influences.

Do you need to ask a thief to give you the green light to organise yourself in your house? Jacques Chirac may be right when he describes Africans as people who have never learned a lesson in the hands of the white man.

That staging of a walk out from parliament in Enugu in 1953 actually led to the holding of the Mamfe Conference of that year, which was a decisive moment but there again the Southern Cameroonians failed to be decisive. That petition to the Secretary of State for colonies in London on May 28, 1953, by Endeley after the Mamfe Conference was unnecessary.

What the Southern Cameroons leadership failed to realise is that the UN, the British and the French are one and the same people. And what any people expect of leadership is that it leads them towards modelling themselves in their own image.

I use just one example to demonstrate the point. Sports became an integral part of government business in the State of West Cameroon, decided at a meeting of April 6, 1967, in Buea at the behest of the Permanent Secretary at the Prime Minister's office. Yet it never succeeded in transforming West Cameroon into a showcase of sports in Africa.

Even the transformation of the Re-unification day of October 1, which was celebrated in West Cameroon as National Day, into a Youth and Sports Day by a circular letter of September 19, 1963, with the intention to stimulate a sports attitude in West Cameroonians was not to be matched by the allocation of funds to achieve that goal.

The FCFA 6 million that was requested by G.N. Ngoh, the Inspector of Youths, Sports and Popular Education Buea, for the management of sporting activities in West Cameroon was never to be regularly made available.

That led to the decay of sports infrastructure throughout West Cameroon and to the underdevelopment of sports. The Victoria Centenary Stadium, inaugurated on Friday, December 12, 1958, by the then Prime Minister of the Federation of Nigeria, Alhadji Abubaka Tafawa Balewa, could not receive any attention in terms of maintenance in the same way as did the Buea Town stadium, the Tiko Holtforth stadium that was authorised by the CDC in 1968 to be used by the Regional Football League, amongst others.

When Ngoh visited East Cameroon he was amazed by the high level of organisation of the sports sector in East Cameroon. In a confidential memo of April 3, 1968, addressed to the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Primary Education, Ngoh stated that, "those of us who have visited most parts of Cameroon know that certain social amenities that contribute to the development of the Youth, Sports and Popular Education activities which do not exist in West Cameroon are found and better organised in East Cameroon at the present time".

When Mr. E.A. Ekiti, the then Vice President of FECAFOOT, attended a meeting of all the active football clubs in Buea on Thursday, January 16, 1969, he described sports in West Cameroon as amounting to "a confused situation" and promised that FECAFOOT would henceforth take over the organisation of all football activities in West Cameroon, which must have contributed in Ahidjo annexing West Cameroon since its leadership had revealed its clumsiness in managing its own affairs.