What if Biya summoned FruNdi for a
tete-a-tete?
 |
| Fru Ndi |
Ahead of the Senatorial election in 2013,
FruNdi announced that the SDF will not field candidates for the election
because the ground was not level for such an important political consultation.
The SDF Chairman said he had also ordered his followers to start sharpening
their machetes to wage a war on Yaounde authorities if ever they tried to go
ahead with the election without the SDF participating. It took a brief meeting
of the Director of Cabinet at the Presidency, Martin BelingaEboutou and John
FruNdi, at the latter’s Yaounde residence, for FruNdi to change his mind and
accept to run SDF candidates in the election. Fru also personally ran in the
election, though he lost.
Intriguingly,
though FruNdi announced the SDF’s participation in the election, he did not say
what had changed in the electoral law as to motivate him to now allow his party
to participate in the election, not to talk of him, FruNdi, also being a
candidate.
It
should be recalled that Fru after the very brief in camera meeting with
Belinga, in Yaounde, changed his mind and unilaterally decided that the SDF
will field candidates in the election and that he would be one of the SDF
candidates for the Northwest senatorial constituency. He did not summon a
meeting of NEC to examine the possibilities as many had expected, but only made
the announcement by way of a message broadcasted on state-owned
radio/television, Crtv.
Observers
wasted no time to question what FruNdi and Belinga had discussed that pushed
the Chairman to so suddenly turn around the original position of his party
vis-a-vis the said election.
Though
it was understood that compromises had been made and political concessions
granted, many believed that FruNdi might have been ‘seduced’ by the President
to allow his party to run in the election this, so as to project Cameroon as a
multi-party democracy in the eye of the international community.
Yet,
until today, what FruNdi and Belinga discussed at that closed door meeting has
remained a mystery to both SDF supporters as well as the general public alike.
But what was important however was that the
SDF finally participated at the election and even won all the senatorial seats
in Adamawa region where she has no counselors, but lost all the seats in her NW
stronghold. FruNdi had thus also lost another election against Biya and the
CPDM.
That
is why ever since the SDF Chairman issued a recent release announcing that his
party will boycott the National Day Commemoration on 20 May, political
bookmakers have again gone to work, speculating that Biya may just send his
most-trusted emissary, BelingaEboutou, to meet the emblematic and charismatic
SDF Chairman and woo him once again to accept to allow his party militants to
join the rest of Cameroonians in celebrating their national day.
Needless
to say that FruNdi’s decision for his party to boycott 20 May is coming at a
very critical moment in the chequered history of the country’s drive towards
unity, national integration and living together. It comes at a time when the
populations of the two Anglophone regions of NW and SW are threating to break
away from the union with their brothers of former East Cameroon.
For
one thing, FruNdi’s decision leaves many with the impression that he is either
in support of the Anglophone agitators or he is not satisfied with the way the
government is dealing with the crisis. And the Chairman’s public utterances
ever since the crisis started way back in October 2016 have hardly been at
variance with these speculations by observers.
Yet,
political watchers say the stiff position of the SDF and its Chairman about the
May 20 event only presents a golden opportunity for President Biya to summon
the opposition leader, Chairman FruNdi, so that they can put their heads
together and examine appropriate ways to thrash the troubling and potentially
lethal crisis in NW and SW before it degenerates into something else, as many
are already speculating.
But
will Biya come down from his pedestal and meet FruNdi? Let’s wait and see!
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