Revisiting Reunification Jubilee Celebs

Ama Muna “hosted” Biya in Buea!
How emotional it must have been for Ama Tutu Muna returning to her childhood home during the Reunification Jubilee State Banquet at the Buea Prime Minister's lodge. She and no one else, among the members of government and other dignitaries, connected in a personal way with the venue where she lived as a primary school girl. Not even President Paul Biya.

By Franklin Sone Bayen
Paul Biya has had brief stays at the Prime Minister's Lodge in Buea on various visits to the South West Region, none lasting any more than a couple of nights on each occasion.
      Belinga Eboutou, Director of Civil Cabinet and Chairman of the National Organizing Committee for the Reunification Jubilee looked around the building in awe as he inspected
rehabilitation works there towards the grandiose event.
      Other members of government may have stopped by there on one or other of President Biya's visits to Buea.
       But in the government, none other than Ama Muna, the Minister of Arts and Culture, has lived, slept and played around that beautiful, prestigious compound otherwise called the Slodge, built in 1901-02 by the German Governor Jesco Von Puttkamer.

    Watching TV pictures of the State banquet at the Slodge on 20 February, Buea-based Barrister-at-Law, Tanjong Ashuntantang remarked laconically: "Ama Muna returns home to host Biya."
    As a little school girl in Ecole Francophone in Buea in the late 1960s-early 1970s when her father, S.T. Muna, was West Cameroon Prime Minister, Ama, last child and lone daughter of Muna played on the well-paved lawns of the Slodge, ran up and down the stairs and around the vast building, into the now mysterious rooms of that vast castle.
    Out of there over 40 years now since her father moved out with his family to new positions in Yaounde, attending that State banquet at the Slodge must have been a mix of nostalgia and a feeling of pride for Ama Muna, who was in fact welcoming president Biya and his wife Chantal to her childhood home.
     “Ama might have been saying to herself that some of  her colleagues in government, who until now were viewing her only as that "little stubborn Bamenda girl", have finally come to see where she spent her childhood days as a "princess" - in a palace looking truly palatial, which they can only envy all their lives. In fact, president Biya lodged at “the Muna’s” throughout his stay in Buea to preside over the Reunification Golden Jubilee!