A Serious Public Nuisance
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Roads in the Capital city Yaounde are blocked whenever
Chantal Biya moves
out of the Unity Palace. This causes serious traffic jams on
the streets.
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The need to protect the President’s wife is understandable,
but it must be balanced against the overall public interest. That Cameroonians
should be treated with such disdain and nonchalance is clearly beyond
commonsense.
I hate to be the one to say this! But the visit last Friday
of the First Lady, Mrs Chantal Pulcherie Vigouroux Biya, to the Yaounde Centre
for Endoscopic Surgery, will be remembered more for all the wrong reasons. The
visit occasioned so much social dislocation as to rekindle public disdain for
abuse of perks by public officials, a derision that becomes heightened when
such abuse comes at the instance of the President of the Republic!
Given the terrible scenario playing out in the country,
manifested in the mass poverty, high corruption in government, gross official
recklessness and near zero governance, it is no surprise that presidential
outings have become a nuisance and source of public anger.
Granted,
Mrs Chantal Biya went to commune with and encourage the users and staff of the
very important health facility. But the visit caused a monumental traffic chaos
that paralyzed social and commercial activities for almost the whole day in the
sprawling metropolis of Yaounde, which looked like a city under siege.
Thousands of commuters were stranded; road rage was everywhere with
Cameroonians cursing and increasing their high blood pressure. Even so, such
was the intensity of the traffic jams that motorcycles were even held up by it.
Roads
around the Omnisports and Ngousso quarters were blocked by police very early in
the morning and reopened only in the evening– all this on a working day!
This is
sheer nonsense! Surely nothing like this happens in any country worthy of
respect. If nothing, but for compassionate and humanitarian reasons, those
charged with the responsibility of protecting the President and his wife should
show more sensitivity to the people who elected the President. Presidential
outings should not be a public nuisance and punishment inflicted on the
citizens.
Blocking
roads and inflicting hardship on innocent Cameroonians is an insult on the
people who are ultimately the source of all power in a democracy. Seriously,
what have Cameroonians done wrong to merit this kind of punishment? The contempt
with which the President’s security operatives treat their fellow compatriots
translates into the senseless and mindless torture inflicted on Cameroonians
whenever Biya travels.
The
President must scrupulously guard against conveying the impression that he does
not care about what the people feel or think.
It has
become a pastime for public office holders to intimidate the public with their
retinue of siren-blaring and gun-trotting goon squads hurtling at breakneck
speeds across our dilapidated roads. Leaders are expected to be role models
through exemplary behavior, but such leaders are few in this country.
In what
happened on Friday, the First Lady, Chantal Biya, was guilty of conducting
herself as if she too was elected, with her unbridled display of vain glory,
from her retinue of friends and advisers, to the outright closure of roads to
herald her arrival at some trivial event.
Cameroonians
are indeed exasperated by the First Lady syndrome exemplified by the pompous
posturing of First Ladies be it Chantal Biya or the wives of Governors and SDOs
in the regions. A Governor once declared after his appointment that there would
be no First Lady syndrome in his administration because of the manner in which
his predecessor’s wife acted. He did not sustain his anger.
In
modern democracies, elected leaders order their affairs on the basis of minimum
inconvenience to the public; while their unelected wives dare not be seen to
intrude into the regular lives of the citizenry.
This
nonsense called advanced democracy has become an unbearable burden to the
people of this country. The political class as a whole has shown impetuous and
irresponsible behavior at the expense of the people. Lawmakers have become law
unto themselves and are wasting taxpayers’ money without any commensurate input
into the quality of governance.
As a
result, the cost of governance in Cameroon is arguably the highest in the
world. This profligacy is consuming a quarter of the national budget. The
prodigal pattern of consumption is being replicated to an extreme degree in
parastatals and Ministerial departments and in all the 10 regions of the
country.
The
looting and the waste going on in Cameroon in the name of governance has no
parallel anywhere else and is responsible for breeding an angry and alienated
citizenry who see no dividend in this whole pernicious enterprise of state
capture by a vampire elite perpetuating a perfidious lifestyle that constitutes
an affront to Cameroonians. It has been argued that collectively, the subterranean
spoils of office in the executive, legislature and judiciary and the abuse of
office among public officials in quantum far exceed the billions of francs
regularly reported as stolen in Cameroon. Long-suffering Cameroonians have been
waiting for the sanitization of the system but it gets worse all the time.
For a
visit that added no real value to the Cameroonian people, the traffic jams,
naturally aggravated by road blockages in strategic areas of the capital city
is inexcusable. President Biya and his wife will do well to move as
unobtrusively as possible.
Those
who seek to protect the President must know that Presidents and First Ladies do
not disrupt traffic in Paris, Washington, London, Rome, Dakar or Accra. First
Ladies and their husbands, and indeed all public officials should learn how not
to offend the people that they are supposed to serve in the first place. This
lesson should start with respecting the rights of ordinary citizens to attend
to their lawful activities without unnecessary inhibition.
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