Southern Cameroon cause: SCNC Activist Charged with conspiracy to Civil War!

Military Judge puts Oben Marxwell and co. under one-year provisional detention

SCNC leaders call on foreign embassies, Fru Ndi and Ayah Paul to urge Biya to also grant clemency to SCNC detainees

By Ayukogem Steven Ojong in Yaounde

SCNC activist Oben Marxwell Eyong, who doubles as the leader of the Southern Cameroon National Coalition, SCNC, would not be tried at the Yaounde Military Tribunal as judicial and administrative authorities of the South West Region had preferred. Oben would be grilled instead by the Military Judge in Buea, according to very reliable information that reached our newsroom in Yaounde.

Oben Marxwell, suffering martyrdom for Southern Cameroonians

                The SCNC diehard was recently sent back to the Buea prison from the Kondengui prison in Yaounde. He had spent a whole month at Kondengui, where he was transferred on 26 February 2014 from Buea. Oben Marxwell was identified in a bus on his way to Yaounde and arraigned by security operatives few days to President Biya’s arrival in the South West regional capital to preside over the reunification celebration on 20 February 2014.

                After spending some days at the police cell in Buea, he was sent down to the Buea prison to await trial at the military tribunal of the South West Region in Buea. On 24 March 2014 the military judge, after studying the report from the investigators, signed an ordinance putting Oben Marxwell under provisional detention at the Buea prison for a period of one year to run from 24 March 2014 to 24 March 2015. Oben is charged with conspiracy to sedition, secession and civil war and hatching a plot to disrupt the reunification celebration in Buea. He has reportedly denied all the charges, insisting that he is only fighting for the restoration of the state of Southern Cameroon.

                When Oben was earlier pressured by the Buea police to admit to the charges brought against him and plead for pardon on condition that he would have nothing any more to do with the SCNC, he refused categorically, we learnt. He reportedly stood his grounds, swearing that he was ready to die for the Southern Cameroon Cause.  

                Then, for reasons that were yet unclear, Oben Marxwell was on 26 February transferred to the Kondengui maximum security prison in Yaounde, from where he was taken intermittently to the Military court. 

                It is believed that Oben’s recalcitrant and adamant stance about the SCNC cause pushed the authorities in Buea to transfer him to Yaounde. This could be so because five other SCNC activists who were also arrested in Muyuka ahead of the reunification celebration but who reportedly proved less head-strong than Oben, were left in the Buea prison at the time of Oben’s transfer to Yaounde.

                Some SCNC militants who visited our Yaounde office last week but who begged to remain anonymous revealed that no sooner did they visit Oben Marxwell at the Kondengui prison to concert with him on strategies for his release than news came that he had been transferred back to the Buea prison. They said the Yaounde military judge denied competence over the matter and asked for Oben to be taken back to Buea.

                SCNC authorities say they have not folded their arms ever since the arrest and detention of Oben and the five other secessionists. They said apart from the calls they have made to the government to release the detainees, they have also dispatched letters to diplomatic missions in Yaounde informing them about the arrests and detentions and urging the foreign embassies to pressure Yaounde authorities to free the SCNC detainees.

                The SCNC leaders also promised to meet the two foremost Anglophone opposition politicians, John Fru Ndi and Ayah Paul Abine to appeal with them to consider joining their voices to the call for president Biya to order the release of the SCNC freedom fighters.

                It should be recalled that only recently, the SDF strongman, John Fru Ndi, swore before a huge crowd of SDF supporters numbering over 5000, in the Mbot Fondom in Donga-Mantung Division that he was now ready to spill the last pint of his blood to fight the Anglophone cause. Fru Ndi lamented the gross injustices perpetrated against the peoples of the former Southern Cameroons by the government of La Republique du Cameroun.

                As for Ayah Paul, the National Scribe and Presidential candidate of the PAP, he has since appropriated the Southern Cameroon struggle, after the frustrations he claimed he was made to suffer during the last twin elections in September 2013.

                Commentators in Yaounde have not stopped wondering aloud why President Biya did not also instruct the release of all SCNC detainees, if he was serious about the reconciliation and national peace and harmony which he said were the factors that motivated him to sign his famous decree granting clemency to over 1400 prisoners including some former senior state functionaries who were imprisoned for corruption.