What Goes Around, Comes Around:

Lessons from Journalist Obama’s Humiliating Arrest

As a journalist and human rights activist, it would never occur to me to celebrate the unhappiness of someone who is more than a fellow journalist. In the name of respecting the right to the presumption of innocence and human dignity, I therefore condemn with the last energy the humiliating arrest of Mr. Ernest Obama Nana this Thursday, June 18, 2020 at the headquarters of the press group Anecdote in Yaounde. I plead for this former general manager of television vision 4 (one of the products of this press group) to have the right to a fair trial while respecting the right to defense.

              

Ernest Obama and his boss, Jean Pierre Amougou

  Having said that, let’s not have a short memory. Ernest Obama is today the victim of the monstrosities of a regime that he had supported yesterday with stripping zeal. Who does not remember Ernest Obama’s calls on Vision 4 T for the massacre of English speaking Cameroonians after the peaceful demonstrations of 1 October 2017 in the NW and SW regions? Result of the conflict: In 3 years of conflict, more than 5,000 dead. Men, women, young people, children, babies and elderly people, killed by Cameroonian soldiers, hundreds of razed villages, dispersed families, others sleeping under the stars in the forests of the English-speaking area.

                Who does not remember the call Ernest Obama made to the General Delegate for National Security, DGSN, Mbarga Nguele, to have Cameroonian diaspora activists Boris Bertolt, Ndzana Seme and Patrice Nouma arrested just for their opinions expressed against the Yaounde regime?

                When the video of the assassination by Cameroonian soldiers of two women and their babies in the Far North was circulated on social networks in July 2018, Obama rushed to the sets of Vision 4 to shout to “a plot against the Cameroonian army.” Today, the same soldiers he defended are facing the trial at the Yaoundé Military Court.

                When the activist Patrice Nouma said of Amougou Belinga that he is a blackmailer who uses the cover of his friend, Minister of Justice, Laurent Esso, for his business, to extort money from the dignitaries of the regime and to launder the public funds stolen by them, Ernest Obama once again went on the antennas of Vision 4 to defend tooth and nail his boss by threatening Nouma from Interpol and by announcing that the Group L’Anecdote will buy his village.

                Obama was far from imagining that it is the same Amougou Belinga he defended yesterday who will make him walk barefoot in suit in front of the cameras of Vision 4 which has also made a whole report on his arrest.

                From his cell at the Secretary of State for Defense (SED), Ernest Obama is undoubtedly realizing that being a zealous servant of a villainous regime does not guarantee you immunity for life. As the Burkinabé journalist of blessed memory, Norbert Zongo, said: “Any compromise with a dictatorship must be paid sooner or later. It is a rule without exception.” Even Amougou Belinga, who believes himself to be all-powerful today, will not escape this rule.

Source: afrinewspro.com