Cameroun - Political Prisonners and Public Secrets in Cameroon

Following the articles: Cameroun - Sérail: Jean-Louis Beh Mengue, ex-DG de l'Art, tente de fuir le Cameroun by Otric Ngon, Cameroon-info.net, august 3, 2017 and Joel Didier Engo’s intervention on the same topic, the regime of Yaoundé, in its macabre tradition, is getting ready to throw Jean-Louis Beh Mengue to the dogs for the perverse and sadistic enjoyment of a handful of docile and pacified Cameroonians who salivate at the spectacle of seeing high ranking members of the administration dragged into the mud.

There is a Chinese adage by Confucius who claims that when the wise man points to the moon, the imbecile examines his fingers. In Cameroon, we are way passed the notion that few bad apples are professional prevaricators of the Cameroonians taxpayers’ money. This is now a systemic problem.

In a pyramidal and highly structured and hierarchical bureaucratic and para-governmental bureaucracy, the president is the garant of the framing, the efficiency, the performance and the control of these institutions. Moreover, the president provides the vision and the leadership under which these bureaucracies function. He is the ultimate responsible of the performance of these administration.

Hence, the perpetual spectacle of high ranking civil servants being thrown to the wolves put the question of the big elephant in the room people pretending not to see. The Australian thinker, Michael Taussig, a specialist on dictatorial regime and political violence calls that state of blindness «public secret». In dictatorial regimes, Public secrets are not so much secret, but ordinary people learning to know what not to know because of the possibilities of violent repression. Taussig argues that public secret is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The issue of political prisonners in cameroon is a «public secret».

The public perception of justice relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive forms of intimidation and terror, it is easy for ordinary people to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that oppressive regimes such as Cameroon does. It allows ordinary Cameroonians to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical. Apart from organizations such as the CL2P and Hurinews which are confronting these public secrets with bravery and under the most difficult condition in terms of daily insults, intimidation, moral and physical harrasment, most ordinary cameroonians keep pretending not to know where the buck stops when it comes to corruption. They continue to enjoy the macabre spectacle put forth by the regime of Yaounde, a spectacle that solves nothing besides ruining the lives of people being subjected to this kind of cruel, cynical and expolitative political exhibitionism.

Hence, public secret is the product of an aporia - an irresolvable internal contradiction, between power and knowledge, between information and denial, between the masks of politics and the goals of an open society one in which the state is expected to act for the people as guarantor of human and civil rights. In order to resolve that contradiction, the president must take his share of responsability and restraint himself from throwing people to the dogs instead of doing his job properly.

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