Three months after Biya took over from Cameroon’s former President Ahmadou Ahidjo on 06 November 1982, as second president of the Cameroons, he paid his first official visit to Bamenda on 05 to 06 February 1983. His youthfulness, pleasant looks, and an attempt to address the Anglophones in English immediately enchanted the Bamenda folk, as he declared Bamenda his “next home”. He was crowned “FON of Fons” and made to bathe in the sacredness and glory of grass field potent biota. Five years down the road, the love affair between President Biya and the Bamenda folk started waning and turned sour.

When the Wind of Change started blowing across the world, the loose lid over the can of worms in Cameroon was blown away, leaving Cameroonians shocked at the deplorable mess left by seven years of Biyaïsm.

President Biya himself condemns what he refers to as intractable corruption, inertia, embezzlement and lack of cohesion amongst his ruling elite, and the inability of these influential folks to move Cameroon into its economic takeoff. Taking power in 1982, Cameroon was said to be doing well economically, socially and politically. There was a semblance of progress as projects were going up everywhere, distributed through the benevolent despotism of Yaoundé. Cameroon had just entered the oil boom, though the politics of oil revenue could be ‘understood’ by only two people; Jean Assoumou Mve of the Hydrocarbons corporation and Biya himself. Cameroonians started expecting much from the new man at the helm but were soon disappointed.

Bamenda set the pace and declared its volte-face by courageously launching an opposition party on 06 May 1990. The launch turned bloody as the paramilitary chopped down 6 patriots with bullets. Even before that turnabout, the Right Honorouble Solomon Tandeng Muna resigned as Speaker of the National Assembly, supposedly the second strongest office of the land. Ahidjo had earlier staged a constitutional coup by changing provisions which ensured that political continuity was maintained by the speaker of the house in the event of the incapacity of the Head of State to reign due to ill-health, death, or resignation. Ahidjo, it is alleged, regretted this one decision to his grave. Action became more radical when the 1992 presidential elections were muscled and the arbitration courts declared their ‘hands tied’, hence couldn’t pronounce Ni John Fru Ndi as 3rd President of the Republic of Cameroon. The state of emergency imposed on Bamenda and victimization, raping, maiming and killing of unarmed civilians convinced all that Bamenda had been marked for obliteration.

Bamenda vomits Biya!

Even after President Biya selected Honourable Simon Achidi Achu from parliament and made him First Minister (not to say Prime Minister, though the first to issue from the house of honourable crooks), Bamenda folks continued their resistance to the Yaoundé authority and Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), fondly called by some the Demolition Movement. Achidi Achu’s Prime Ministry, assigned the role of Reconciliation, but soon turned out to be the peak of corruption and ethnic schism in Cameroon. It was under his ‘reconciliation missions’ that the SAWA (coastal tribes) marched against Bamenda people who were dubbed settlers (Come no go) in the South West. North West vernacular language broadcasts over Radio Buea were suppressed and only SAWA languages continued, even though the Bamenda folk were to benefit most being in the majority in this region.

Feeling tortured and marginalized at home, demonized and haunted ‘abroad’, Bamenda people went underground and became the invisible righteous elements of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of the 10 regions in Cameroon, it was known that if you wanted to hear the truth, you had to go to Bamenda. Yaoundé was wary of what Bamenda will make of any decision, and it was the Bamenda position that the country ended up adopting, even in any distorted form. 

Today, a series of civil society organizations are springing up all over the North West Region, with mission to hoodwink Bamenda. We now have NOWEFU (North West Fon’s Union), Ntumfors, Civil Society of North West Associations. Etc. As it has emerged, the patrons of such outfits are people interested in self-aggrandizement and would go by hook or by crook to have their way. 

Some are smart to ask “what has Bamenda gain in being in the opposition?” From birth, as early as two, I learnt to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  Yes, for what is correct, good, fair and acceptable. No, for what is despicable, deplorable, nonsensical and farcical. From two, I learnt to call white, white, and black, black. There is no middle ground. It rocks my inner being and the God in me to sit on the fence and to be a hypocrite.

My Bamenda brothers and sisters say they have lost a lot opposing Biya for over 20 years. They concede that the rest of the country has developed while Bamenda is lagging behind. I take exception to this argument. The best development is mental. All along, I believed the Bamenda folk had unshackled itself from mental slavery. They had reached the point of turning stones into bread, which they do everyday across the world. They had taken a bath in the pool of wisdom and resilience.

I don’t seem to see any change happening in Cameroon to occasion the ‘massive return of the Bamenda folk to Biya’. Corruption, embezzlement, inertia, electoral fraud and mismanagement are still rife in Cameroon. Human rights violations, bad governance and ‘advanced democracy’ are still hallmarks of Cameroon’s progress. Is the revolution that begun in Cameroon in 1990 coming to an end?

Some folks in the North West Region quickly retort that they are only trying to catch the Lion in his own trap, and were not staging a counterrevolution.

I cannot pretend there are no changes going on in Bamenda. Current Prime Minister Yang Philemon, ‘son of the soil’ as the others called it is from Bamenda. Work on the airport and roads is going on. For the first time in over 20 years, the road to Mbengwi is being properly graded and surfaced. It took me less than 20 minutes to cover the 25 kilometers to Mbengwi on 9 January 2010, and at ‘only’ FCFA 500. Electricity finally arrived at Acha Tugi Hospital after more than 25 years of clamouring for it. Folks are jubilating after the rumors that 40 kilometers of road between Bamenda and Acha Tugi hospital will be tarred, and all this before the celebration of the Armed Forces day in Bamenda. This celebration, apparently bringing a semblance of goodwill to the Bamenda Province, is construed by the Southern Cameroonian as a reminder of the military occupation of its territory by la République du Cameroun. Albeit all suppositions and supplications, something is changing in Bamenda and hooking the Bamenda folk to the ‘demolition movement’. “This is, of course, a right and not a favour.” Vewesse, the trade unionist, says.

Yet, how dangerous is it for the ‘Swine to return to its mire after a bath’. How bad is it for the ‘Dog to return to its vomit’? On this score I remember the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah. The creator said if He could find only one righteous person there, then He will spare Sodom and Gomorrah.  The advocate of life for Sodom and Gomorrah looked for that one righteous person and found none. Sodom and Gomorrah, therefore, was destroyed. As Bamenda, the only righteous region in Cameroon by virtue of its protracted epic opposition to Yaoundé, delivers itself back to the oppressors, surely the spiritual doom of Cameroon has come. It will come in dimensions worse than the hate and quake that hit the voodoo Haiti. Maybe just temporal vistas of a nightmare!