Tag: marginalisation

Who is an enabler?

With the contrasting comments on the ADF’s arrest of Sen. Mundi it is perhaps high time it was clear who is an enabler.

If we assume that anyone in that category needs to be Ambazonian by birth, then we can take it for granted that other LRC officials such as governors and other so-called “chefs de terre” do not need to be included as they are already opponents by virtue of their “jobs” of enforcement of LRC’s control.

All who have joined LRC’s parliament or government who regularly describe our struggle as terrorism or misguided small groups are easy to distinguish. They would include the likes of Fru Ndi who recently proposed that LRC’s parliament should pass laws to deport diaspora leaders of the struggle. He has enjoyed a dubious protection and quasi immunity which sits at odds with “his party’s” continued complicity in validating LRC’s hegemony over Ambazonia. Sitting on the fence is not good enough especially when he occasionally jumps down on the other side as he did in his aforementioned brainstorm on deportations.

The mayors or councillors and any others who wear LRC’s flag sashes are also enabling LRC’s hegemony no matter whether they are our school mates. The struggle will only drag on and is, in fact, dragging on because of our failure to accept the enablers as losses. Such people need to choose and they cannot choose to “wait and see” while posing in LRC’s flag.

We also need to face reality at some point and insist that traditional authorities who allow themselves to be paraded by LRC’s propaganda machines or exceed their authority by claiming to represent their subjects while safely stowed in LRC’s as their villages are burnt by LRC’s militias cannot be given the benefit of the doubt.

Those who are not…

Since the consensus that education was essential and could not be actively inhibited, it would be worth making it clear that lay teachers who do not fall under other categories of enablers should be protected until we are in a position to run our education system.

The Ambazonian Struggle -part 1

The current phase of the Ambazonian struggle started in earnest in October 2016 when the security forces of the Republic of Cameroon followed routine to “resolve” a protest by lawyers and teachers in the Anglophone regions of the country.

The routine was that the protesters would receive broken bones at the hands of the forces and return to their place in the pyramid. Occasionally this would be followed by one or two of the leaders of such protests being brought in through the benevolent and magnanimous patronage of the Head of State, or one of his ministers, on his “high instructions”. Yes, they do like to use this phrase to cover their actions! More often, there would be lessons, in the form of long stints in squalid detention conditions with few rights or any recourse to the law. This routine ensure an island of peace in the troubled region.

This time the routine did not work. Broken bones were less obvious than humiliation, but the widespread distribution of the images of the belittlement meted out to these two groups unexpectedly drew support and courage from the wider anglophone community. Clearly fed up with the routine ritual humiliation that had come to be expected towards anglophones from the francophone system and increasing from francophone functionaries, the population en masse rose to say “enough is enough”.

Big marches took place where the pent up resentment was vented openly. The resentment itself was no surprise, having been barely concealed over the years. The surprise was the scale and courage shown. Few would back down even after live rounds from the security forces resulted in several deaths in Bamenda. Even the brutalisation and humiliation of students in Buea and Bamenda did not quell the protests.  Incredible anecdotes of the humiliation of anglophones at the hands of the francophone hierarchy began to emerge and what may individually have seemed like the discrimination of individuals was revealed to be a systematic scheme. Images of the forces only galvanized the diaspora to denounce the injustice.

The government would not revise its routines, which had always worked.