Anglophone Crisis:

Why an Imminent UN Intervention Discomforts Y’de

Dieudonné ESSOMBA

The United Nations, as usual, has suggested that they can intervene in Cameroon about the Anglophone crisis. This sibylline speech reflects a fundamental break and highlights the risks of management based on rigid principles, stubbornness and all-security.

            The UN will come to Cameroon, and it is certainly not to fight the secessionists for the benefit of the government, but to intervene and impose the conditions of a negotiation between two enemy camps!

            Two enemy camps! In other words, two armed groups with the same legitimacy and to whom peace must be imposed, willingly or by force. Alas! The Government has succeeded in transforming a larval movement into a rebel army to which the international community now attributes legitimacy similar to that of the Cameroonian National Army! In less than two years!

            I do not know how our leaders reason! From the top, they do not listen to anyone! Much worse, they equate any objective analysis that could guide an intelligent public action into an act of anti-patriotism!

            Someone tells you that if you drink this spring, you will have cholera, and instead of listening to it to at least boil the water, you accuse it of wanting your death! And now when you are sick, instead of acknowledging your stubbornness, you accuse him of having cast a bad spell on you! This is exactly our leaders!

            However, it is enough of a simple analysis to understand what to do with the English-speaking problem from the beginning, starting from a certain number of principles:

1. There is no case on Earth where a community representing 20% of a population in a unitary state has been forcibly maintained. The reasons are economic: it's as if you had 5 brothers, one of whom wants to leave the group. Instead of mollifying him by negotiating with him an operation that allows him to stay in the group, you tie him up and you commit another brother to his supervision.

            As a result, you end up with only 3 brothers who have to feed the 5, which is unbearable. For the English-speaking case, this means that the constraint approach is an economic constraint that leaves Cameroon's useful capacity at only 60% of its capacity.

            There is therefore no human mechanism that can lead to forcibly holding Anglophones in the bonds of a unitary state. By pursuing this dead end, the Government is driving the state of Cameroon to ruin. The strongest countries in the world, powerfully industrialized and making weapons, like France with Corsica, Great Britain with Northern Ireland, Russia with Putsin and Chechnya, and Greater China with Tibet have crawled on their knees before the secessions and have had their salvation only by granting them a federal status.

            How could one believe that a small country, as poor and under structural adjustment as Cameroon, could afford the luxury of a secession representing 20% of its population! It's amazingly irresponsible!

            2. Anglophones came under the auspices of the United Nations. They were not part of Francophone Cameroon at the time of Independence. They had their independence later, and that counts in their status at least symbolically! It is a region that could have been a state, and that would never have been contested. But the UN has decided to link them to either Nigeria or Cameroon. Southern Cameroon accepted to join Cameroon in a federation. And all this was happening under the authority of the United Nations.

            How could anyone believe for a moment that the United Nations could let this happen without prompt intervention, even though its responsibility in this situation was engaged? Already, without this responsibility, it intervenes without asking the opinion of the protagonists. It did so in Sudan, for example, and led the secession of South Sudan. How could one imagine for a moment that she would remain insensitive to this situation of which she felt herself responsible? It was absolute nonsense!

            3. Finally, Anglophones constitute a specific community marked by colonial referents different from the rest, such as language and modes of organization based on the Indirect Rule. How did you think that by tinkering with a sort of syncretism strongly mixed with French Jacobinism, we could make this pill swallowed by this Community, simply because we affirmed bilingualism?

            Perhaps the objective of the unitary state was very beautiful, but the value of a project is not limited to its objectives, as beautiful as they are, but also and above all its operational feasibility. From an anthropological point of view, the project was not feasible.

            Unfortunately, the government remained blinded by its unitary state dogma and its "national unity", thus losing all the good opportunities that presented itself to put an end to this infernal dynamic.

            In 1991, during the Tripartite, two groups were fiercely opposed: the partisans of the unitary state with a strong and centralized power, and the partisans of a federal state. To cut the pear in half, the Tripartite had opted for a decentralized unitary state. The formula was adopted in the 1996 Constitution.

            The overwhelming majority of the Cameroonian population appreciated this solution, either for the ideological motives of preference for a single State or for giving Regions autonomy or for tactical reasons, in order to try decentralization before considering later a possible federation.

            Unfortunately, with its procrastination and diversions, the Government will behave as if it had only accepted it to save time. To the point where it will end up even annoying Anglophones best disposed towards him, thereby amplifying seduction to immediate federation.

            And it will aggravate the situation by stifling by violence the federalist movement, in other words, Cameroonians who love their country, but ask for a change of model.

            A tragic error that will feed the Absolute Monster, the Unholy Secession! This already very old movement, which had lived until then in a larval way, will find a fertile ground to develop and impose its legitimacy not only on the English-speaking population, but on the international level.

            To the Federalists who negotiated in the institutions and feared the state, the action of the Government aroused and amplified the secessionists who declared the state outlawed, as the occupying power and they fight by fire and blood.

            The experience of the highly seasoned Cameroonian army, the arrests, the extraditions of the political leaders and the raids of the local elites have nourished some hopes, but far from subsiding, Secession tends to cancerous, multiplying metastasis under form of armed groups more or less politicized and in any case, uncontrollable.

            A taboo has been broken, a myth has fallen: the state whose leaders believed was invincible now finds itself unable to neutralize a secession that is destroying it publicly, openly, and with it being unable to do anything. Today the state can only make impotent denunciations while the secessionists make their law prevail!

             But how did we allow ourselves to get to such a quagmire? A Secession? It's really terrible!

            Now, the United Nations will come! It was also predictable. But it will not be to take the side of the Government, but to listen to two parties: the Government, assimilated to Cameroon Francophone, and the Secessionist Forces, assimilated to Anglophones.

            And let no illusion be made. The English-speaking civilian elite on which the government or Francophones rely will not have much to say because it is not the armed force, and therefore, it is not the one who creates the problems. They are the military and political leaders of the Secession, because it is they who have the power of nuisance that they prove every day and which, by this very fact, impose themselves more and more on the imagination of the populations. Anglophones are true defenders because they do not whine like the Federalists, but act and hurt.

            The United Nations will be there. It will not accept the Southern Cameroons Secession, but it will not accept the unitary State of the Government either. It can only ask for the return to the 1961 Federation as a basis for discussion, since it is the only institutional form of Cameroon that it knows. Other subsequent developments will not interest it, especially since these evolutions are at the source of the disputes.

            The negotiations will be based on the 1961 Federation, whose terms will be reviewed. This means, in plain language, that, we are heading towards a two-state Confederation, with all it implies in terms of symmetrical rights:

            1. The power of Yaoundé will no longer have control over the English-speaking Zone and will limit it to diplomatic action, although Anglophones will have the right to establish consulates;

            2. Resources will be shared between the two states and Yaoundé will no longer fully control the oil and other resources of this area

            3. State power will be shared. We will end up with a rotation at the top of the state, the insertion of rebels in the army with their respective ranks, the sharing of posts with an army composed of 40% of Anglophones and 60% of Francophones, as well as other similar forms of sharing.

            This is clearly what awaits Cameroon. It's like football we're seeing now at the World. When a team loses all its chances, the opposing team ends up turning the tide.

            And that's exactly what we see: if the UN Nations set foot in Cameroon, we immediately go to Confederation.

            We still have little hope: God enlighten the spirit of the people who command us and immediately proclaim the Federation to 10 states.

            For the last time, it is necessary to proclaim the Cameroonian Federation in 10 States and it must be done immediately!

            Woe to us if the UN puts his feet without Cameroon being already federal! We will be lost!

NB: This write up by Dieudonné ESSOMBA, was originally done in French, with the title: CAMEROON GOES TO CONFEDERATION, HELAS! (our translation).