By Ayukogem Steven Ojong in Yaounde
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| Manyu CPDM Boss, Minister Victor Mengot, supervised the investitures |
The three persons were the ones chosen to contest under the CPDM ticket following the investitures conducted by the party recently. No opposition parties exist or are making any impact in Manyu presently. So, the CPDM candidates invested are honourable parliamentarians in waiting.
According to information we gathered from usually unimpeachable sources, Mrs. Agbortogo Juan epse Agborntui, Mr. Teku Tanyi Tiku and Mr. Aka Martin Tyoga would be the Manyu flag-bearers of the CPDM party in the legislative elections scheduled to hold on 9 February 2020.
The three are respectively the representatives of Mamfe/Upper Bayang; Eyumojock and Akwaya constituencies. They emerged as the best? candidates after the investitures supervised by the head of the CPDM Permanent Coordination Delegation to Manyu, Sisekou Victor Mengot Arrey Nkongho, who doubles as Minister in charge of Special Duties at the Presidency of the republic.
The Median gathered that three lists of candidates were submitted to the investiture committee in Manyu division. While one of the lists was rejected outright, two were juxtaposed and candidates picked from them to constitute the list of three.
We learned that Mrs Agbortogo Juan was leader of the list that had Mr. Teku Tiku Tanyi and Mr Manoji Benedict as running mates, while Aka Martin from Akwaya belonged to the list that had Hon. Okpu Susan Eba Nsosie (incumbent MP for Eyumojock) as leader, and veteran journalist who is also alternate to senator Tabetando, Eno Chris Oben Mbakwa as running mate for Mamfe/Upper Bayang.
From the foregoing we could very easily extrapolate that Aka Martin was lifted from the list headed by Hon. Okpu Susan and grafted onto the list headed by Agbortogo Juan. He displaced Benedict Manoji in the process.
Aka Martin is understood to hail from Northern Akwaya like the late MP, Hon. Igele. We are told that the two were even related. But we could not independently confirm this by the time we went to press yesterday.
As for Eno Chris Oben Mbakwa, we learned that his being an alternate senator played to his disfavour. One cannot be Senator and Member of National Assembly at the same time.
The Median could not get explanations as to why Benedict Manoji who was in the same list with Juan Agborntui and Teku Tanyi Tiku had to be dropped and replaced with Aka Martin. It is hoped that Minister Mengot, who is the vision-bearer of Manyu CPDM and who supervised the parliamentary investitures in Manyu would provide explanations sometime later that is, if he deems it necessary.
The Old Guard Give Way
A noticeable feature of the investitures in Manyu is absence of all three incumbent Manyu MPs in the list invested by the CPDM Central Committee and submitted at Elecam. If it is understood that death cut short Akwaya’s Hon. Igele’s mandate in Parliament, and that Hon. Eno Tanjong, who initially indicated readiness to run for a second mandate, later threw in the towel perhaps, for reasons of age and his failing sight, it was not immediately known why Hon. Okpu Susan was not given the opportunity of a second mandate as she had so desperately wanted.
However, indiscretions by some Manyu CPDM insiders hold that Hon. Okpu’s unstable health which renders her occasionally frail, might have militated against her bid to return to Parliament for a second mandate. We are told that personal efforts by the MP, and even her connections to intercede for her and plead her case to Minister Mengot, met with an adamant Manyu political leader and vision-bearer.
Observers note that Minister Mengot, who pushed Okpu Susan’s candidacy file through, in 2013, to the utter disappointment of Prof. Peter Agbor Tabi (RIP), who fronted instead Mrs Manchang Pauline as his candidate from Eyumojock, in preference to Okpu Susan and Hon. Obenofunde, might not have seen reason enough to support Okpu Susan’s bid this time.
In politics it is said “there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, but permanent interests.” It could be that with the death of Prof. Agbor Tabi, Minister Mengot’s interests and stakes have changed; they are now such as to favour the positioning of a new, more trusted ally as MP from Eyumojock, other than maintain Okpu Susan, who initially was understood to be an Agbor Tabi ally but who turned to Mengot for political rescue and survival only when things had gotten sour between she and Agbor Tabi.
Yet, for some keen observers of the Manyu political scene, Teku Tanyi’s investiture did not come as a big surprise. If anything, it could be seen coming.
The observers note that following the appointment of Dr. Agborambang Antem (the erstwhile CPDM charge de mission for Manyu) as Chief of protocol at the PM’s Office, it is Teku Tanyi (he is also fondly called TT) that Minister Mengot has since been using intermittently as his political charge de mission.
Apart from that, the observers advanced other serious reasons that might have played to TT’s favour and to incumbent Okpu Susan’s disfavour. But we would mention them here because we see them as mere conjecture and hardly as stark realities.
Be it as it may, the investiture of candidates by political parties in Manyu, like in the rest of Cameroon, has come and gone. And the good thing about the investitures in Manyu was the quiet, maturity and mutual understanding that sanctioned the process, unlike in other divisions and regions were they were mired by loud, sometimes violent protests.
Elecam is has 15 days to scrutinize the candidacy files and publish the list of qualified candidates. The fate of the three candidates from Manyu would therefore be known on or before the 10th of December.
Unfortunately, we could not get enough information from our trusted sources on the constitution of council lists in the four municipalities in Manyu. All we gathered was that the list leaders for Mamfe and Tinto were changed. But we could not immediately confirm this.
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