Anglophone uprising:

Cameroon gov’t persecutes diaspora Anglophones

By Ekum-Tambe Eku in Douala

Mr. Mbi Jonathan

The government of Cameroon appears to have imposed a travel ban on Anglophones from entering the country, usually reliable sources at Airports and border posts have hinted this newspaper. The sources say Anglophone Cameroonians returning from countries abroad are arrested and persecuted by police and gendarme officers,  with some thrown in jail without prior charge or trial.

                Our sources said a recent case was that of Mr Mbi Jonathan, a Cameroonian studying for his Master’s degree in Denmark. Mbi who was returning to Cameroon for holidays, was waylaid just as he stepped out of the Douala International Airport, by some plain cloth security men, who took him to a nearby police station and got him well tortured.

                Mbi  reportedly incurred a fractured hand and head, and a bloodied nose. He only survived  thanks to the intervention of a lawyer who had come to the police post to seek bail for one of his clients. The lawyer reportedly chastised the police officers before he accompanied Mbi to the hospital. The lawyer later brought a case against the police officers, we learnt. 

                Media reports say immigration officers posted at Cameroonian airports consider all Anglophone Cameroonians entering the country from abroad as belonging to the outlawed separaatist groups seeking the independence of Southern Cameroons.

                Our sources say apart from Mbi Jonathan, several other returning Anglophones have been made to suffer the same persecution, with some of them even thrown in jails in Douala and the capital Yaounde.

                It should be noted that the unannounced restriction on the entry into the country for Anglophones in the diaspora is coming just weeks after the government convened a forum in Yaounde to convince diaspora Cameroonians to return home and invest.

                Commentators say this contradiction by government is simply mind-boggling and shows a government completely out of touch with a reverse sense of its own priorities.

                Obviously, Diaspora Anglophones like Mr Mbi are now an endangered species whether or not they support the ongoing Anglophone independence struggle.

                But any responsible government will not shut the door on its citizens; while at the same time asking them to come back home and invest.

                “Is the government pretending not to know that all the Cameroonians who attended the Diaspora Forum hold passports and resident cards from their countries of origin? Who is fooling who?” wondered one source, who recalled that only recently the same government rolled out the red carpet for a group of black Americans who claimed to have traced their ancestry to Cameroon; yet it is denying entry to its natural born citizens.

                “The government would do well to send its “blacklist” to the embassies to screen visa applicants because issuing someone a visa only to turn round and molest or block the person at the port of entry only reinforces Cameroon’s international image as a country with highly dysfunctional institutions where bizarre things happen,” regretted a commentator, who lamented that “such a pig-headed policy is not only ill-advised and counter-productive but plainly egregious in its stupidity.

                Either way, it is the country’s economy that loses because the rejected Anglophones constitute part of the Cameroon Diaspora that has helped sustained the Biya regime with remittances.