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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Maurice Kamto Next President of Cameroon?


Although an administrative injunction denied former minister delegate for Justice, Maurice Kamto, the chance to explain his recent resignation from government through a press conference, it did not however prevent the university professor from using other means to elucidate his act and sell his dreams of a better Cameroon to the public.
In an email sent to local media houses, Kamto unveiled a personal manifesto sharing his views on how Cameroon can get better; called for hope in the population and promised to propose “ideas and a team to carry them” in the future.
The move was widely seen as a thinly-veiled launch of Kamto’s presidential campaign, even though elections are officially seven years away yet Maurice Kamto is ‘calling for a new dawn’, I declare that the road is open to a new hope,” this declaration issued by the man described by U.S. diplomats as Cameroon’s version of Barrack Obama states.
In a messianic tone only typical of a political discourse, the statement invites all political forces and civil society movements that have made sacrifices for collective freedom to defy the odds and “carry the new hope to its accomplishment”. “We shall be in the movement. For this, we shall present to the country, in the coming days, ideas and a team to bear them,” the concluding words of the declaration announce.
To political analysts, Maurice Kamto is on his way to succeed President Biya.
In an assessment of the present state of affairs in Cameroon, Kamto highlighted that “unanimity in politics, Cameroonian democracy is regressing offering the people only a chance to make an improbable choice between a state party and itself”.
“The state of law stammers in the face of useless violence and families are crying for justice in vain,” the man who only recently supervised the work of Cameroon’s justice and human rights system complains. Commentators are of the opinion that Maurice Kamto’s resignation could easily be zoomed from these declarations. However, Kamto’s declaration has poked a new wave of reflection about his political ambitions. Coming from an astute intellectual mind whose heroic resignation from government last November engendered intense comments that exposed the weaknesses and failures of the Biya regime, the statement has pushed some observers to affirm that Maurice Kamto is gunning for a full-blown career in the opposition as head of state come 2018.
Yet, following his resignation, Gregoire Owona, the outspoken government minister who often speaks on behalf of the ruling CPDM party as its deputy secretary general said Kamto resigned to “put himself in the logic of 2018”, the year President Paul biya’s recently acquired 7-year mandate expires. However, Kamto noted that “I did it with patriotism,” Kamto explained in his Wednesday’s declaration. “I took the 30 November 2011 decision for the sake of the future,” but could not clarify what was at stake in the future that necessitate his resignation from government.
A future which the law professor fears is greatly compromised by venomous tribalism.
“I could not resolve to stand by indefinitely and watch tribalism poisoning the life and the soul of the Cameroonian nation for generations to come,” Kamto declared creating the link between his resignation and ethnically offensive comments about the political succession stakes in Cameroon made by his former immediate boss at the Justice ministry, Amadou Ali and released by Wikileaks and widely reported by the media.
To some critics, Kamto’s resignation is coming too late because the publication of the said Wikileaks cable last August should have been the right moment for him to slam the door on the Biya regime. Worthy to note that according to the U.S. diplomatic cable, former vice Prime Minister of Justice Amadou Ali told then U.S. Ambassador Janet Garvey that it was impossible for a person of Bamileke descent to succeed President Paul Biya.
Amadou Ali also hinted that elite from the northern regions would gladly support President Paul Biya for as long as he desires to stay in power but will not allow another southerner from the President’s ethnic Beti group to ascend to power. Conclusively, Ali suggested that Anglophones from the Northwest and Southwest regions and Bamileke from the West region, from which Kamto hails, are completely left out of the current succession plans of the regime. This political act immediately attracted many comments, insults, passionate reactions and questions. Many observers in the political scene, academic circles, social networks and private circles, have questioned whether the method, timing, scope and unspoken of this approach which precedents are as little as the hairs on the head of Manu Dibango. The most recent resignation of a member of the government dates back to 1992 (Garga Haman Adji). More seriously, it is obvious that in a country where democratic governance is far from dynamic facts, it goes without saying that the resignation of a minister is anything but ordinary act without implications.
First, the arguments raised by the SDO to ban the press conference by a former cabinet minister was questionable, especially when one has to face the caciques of those in power who always describe the political system of Cameroon as "peaceful democracy". How do we explain that a Press Conference by a former cabinet minister could be seen through the contours of a political act, a threat to security and public disorder? Is it not a case of clear violation of human rights? Yet, Maurice Kamto’s Press Conference was banned by the regime he served and played numerous roles for it to survive.
Faced with this decision as arbitrary and unjustifiable legally and administratively, Maurice Kamto nevertheless released, albeit in very general terms - the motivations for his resignation that many Cameroonians are still to understand his political agenda.
That the ideas of Kamto are subject to the sanction analytical seems quite normal, even necessary for the quality of public debate and democratic vitality, but they would come to criminalize those "political ambitions" and the future of this great nation.
However, several actors from the political scene in Cameroon were quick to qualify Maurice Kamto as a versatile and an opportunistic character. Do we not say that it is often the opportunity that makes the thief. In reality, the issue of opportunism that is posed here refers more to the issue of inexhaustible interest in the governance of human actions. At this level, I have the weakness to think that with the exception of the Son of man, every human being is self-interest or opportunity. To return to the versatility supposed Kamto, do we not often say that only fools do not change? He has previously supported the opposition in what he thought was right. If God did for us all, who could cope?
Maurice Kamto seems to have endorsed this thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. suggests that: "There comes a time when people can not endure more, and where men no longer bear to be plunged into the abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness of despair corrosive. [...] There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
If we stick to his "political career", there is little doubt of his patriotism and his positions critical of the Biya regime. It seems to me that by entering the government, Maurice Kamto wanted above all to gradually understand the system from within and to fight it from without.

1 comment:

Ebwellé Hortense said...

People from all ethnic origins are free to go in for presidency in Cameroon. No one can decide on who should go in or not. We are in a democratic country.
Kamto was not the only Bamileke in the government. He had other reasons for resigning and this had nothing to do with the wikileaks cable.