Sequel to incomplete payment of their dues:

Soldiers defy threats, plan another protest !

The over 200 of the Cameroonian soldiers who were on mission to the Central African Republic have been asked to drop their plan pending settlement of their problem by hierarchy at the end of October

By Tanyi Kenneth Musa in Yaounde

Cameroonian soldiers are in the news again. After 200 of them staged a protest march in the streets of Yaounde on Wednesday, 9 September 2015 to demand the payment of money owed them, they are again promising to repeat their action if they are not paid the rest of the money. They are nursing this new plan despite the silent punishment some of them are said to have received after the first incident.

                The soldiers involved are elements of the international peace-keeping force that were deployed to the Central African Republic. One of them who spoke to The Median last week on conditions of anonymity disclosed that in spite of what some of his colleagues said on national television on 10 September 2015 when they were paid their dues, the money owed them was not paid in its entirety. Said he:

                “Thanks to the initiative of the African Union (AU), the International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) was supposed to pay each of us an allowance of 750 000 FCFA every month. This had nothing to do with our monthly salary in Cameroon. However, amongst the 200 of us who marched in Yaounde on 9 September, none has received more than 250 000 FCFA a month. You can thus see that each of us is still entitled to 500 000 FCFA multiplied by the number of months we spent on mission. 

                “I am not here to say what has happened to some of our colleagues who protested last month. Suffice it to say that we were getting set to stage another protest at the end of September but were asked to suspend it because the hierarchy has promised to pay our dues by the end of October. So we keep our fingers crossed.”

                It should be recalled that when the protest march took place in Yaounde last month, President Paul Biya, who was on vacation in Europe at the time, ordered the immediate disbursement of 6 billion FCFA to take care of the soldiers’ worries. The Cameroon government did so pending reimbursement from the AU that later presented their mea culpa but said the amount they owed the soldiers was not so astronomical. 

                All of which raised a lot of questions in the minds of Cameroonians who sought to know why some of the 1 300 Cameroonians soldiers in the Central African Republic were paid their dues and others were not.