The CL2P, Despotic media Practices, Power and Institutional Politics in Cameroon
CAMEROUN :: POINT DE VUE

CAMEROUN :: The CL2P, Despotic media Practices, Power and Institutional Politics in Cameroon

As with the latest display of power of Mr. Amougou Belinga, the Biya’s regime media mogul in chief is cause of concern on the nature of news and subjectivity. Mr. Amougou Belinga is well known in the past of having published a list of 50 homosexuals through his newspaper L’Anecdote creating a climate of hysteria that has led to the criminalization of homosexuality in Cameroon and promoting the notion of a “pure” Cameroonian “Volk” which has never even existed.

The CL2P opposes any governments or religious group that tries to deploy social stigma as cannon fodder to effect discipline and respect for its doctrines and ideologies of conformity.

Therefore, the recognition that Mr. Amougou Belinga’s project goes beyond delivering the news, it is in fact a performance text that betrays a project of radical transformation of the Cameroonian subjectivity and society. How our relationship to the truth peddle by the likes of Amougou Belinga actually changes the nature of our subjectivity and how relationship to politics and our institutions which goes beyond the media. In practice, the kind of identity the state of Cameroon is creating.

Indeed, the recent display of Biya’s government members, and other high ranking members of his administrations such as General managers and other dignitaries on tthe local television called "thousand hills" (VISION 4), to celebrate the first communion of the children of a former "robber" of CAMPOST tells us a lot. This country seems definitively lost for Humanity.

It is at least a surrealist scene in this banana republic, where the TV news shows the all-powerful Justice Minister Laurent Esso feasting on his protégé Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, the man who with impunity has been sequestering for more than a year the two audiovisual consultants David Eboutou and Patrick Sapack; then confiscate the money (700 million FCFA) that they had received at the end of the services provided on behalf of the Group to the President of the Republic of Congo, Dénis Sassou Nguesso.

We have to remember that these two consultants who are still languishing in the Kondengui prison in total indifference of the Cameroonian authorities, have received a sentence of 30 months in prison for "attempted fraud via social networks", while they had already served 19.

That is to say if "the magnate of the press to the glory of the president" Amougou Belinga can in a snap of fingers ruin lives and professional careers in Cameroon, with the complicity of the barons of the Yaounde regime, including the supposed Keeper of the seals Laurent Esso.

Consequently, because the CL2P believes that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other Cameroonian, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined above are vetted appropriately if we were in a normal country.

The concept of a modern nation-state, however, is more an ideal than a reality in Cameroon. Most ordinary Cameroonians do not feel that the ruling elite in their country are promoting their own national interest, but only that of the ruling party which is the CPDM. In this Machiavellian ethos, the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. Accumulating privileges they do not deserve, however, is a recipe for disaster. The enduring nature of unearned privileges and mediocrity of the CPDM’s elite block the emergence of the kind of responsible and competent citizenship the CL2P is fighting for.

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