Western Revisionism of Togolese and African Realities

September 1, 2012

By Juliette Abandokwe

As I was looking for information in English on the anti-government demonstrations in Togo and their repression by Gnassingbe's army since last June, I found almost nothing, except this!

Togo Civil War 1991-1992 (http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/tango/togo1991.htm)

The disclosure (April 1991) of killings allegedly by security forces set off huge, violent demonstrations against the military-controlled government of President Gnassingbe Eyadema (1937-) of Togo (formerly French Togoland), on the south coast of West Africa. Under much public pressure for democratization, Eyadema then legalized opposition political parties and was forced (due to a general strike) to convene a national conference, attended by both military and civilian representatives (July-August 1991). Soldiers failed to halt the conference, which declared itself sovereign; civilians formed a governing council, with free multiparty elections set for 1992 (later postponed). At the conference, militant troops invaded but withdrew through a show of civilian strength. Eyadema remained nominally president, and his loyal troops later (October 1992) occupied the National Assembly building in Lomé, the capital, holding civilian legislators hostage until they agreed to unfreeze the assets of Eyadema's party, the Rally of the Togolese People. Pro-Eyadema forces later attacked and killed opposition leaders, pro-democracy demonstrators, and dissident soldiers and others (1993-94), securing President Eyadema's hold on Togo's government.

My unique question rose immediately….

How can violent repression of a people by the "security forces" of an illegal military controlled government be called a "civil war", if not by western media!?

The same may be happening again these next days in Togo. 

The people of Togo have been putting up with the Gnassingbé family's tyranny since 1963.

After having succeeded to pay off his country's foreign debt, Sylvanus Olympio, first President of "independent" Togo, was murdered in January 1963 by Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadema (backed up by France, "Friend of Togo") who remained in power until his death in 2004. His repressive regime has probably been among the most brutal in sub-Saharan Africa.

After a few months of illegal leadership, then legalised by rigged elections in April 2005 (again backed up by France, the everlasting "Friend of Togo"), his son Faure Gnassingbé gracefully took over, turning Togo into a internationally recognised monarchy, and who is today desperately trying to keep up with his second « France-friendly » mandate .  

Since 12 June 2012, the "Save Togo" movement ("Sauvons le Togo") has succeeded in peacefully mobilizing thousands of Togolese, who are demanding self-determination, respect for non-amended Constitution, end of repression and of looting of public funds and resources, as well as access to their basic human rights; Togolese people are globally claiming the end of clan-based tyranny of the Gnassingbé monarchy.

But phobia of demonstrations by the regime is congenital in Togo, as in other places in Africa, and the army has been out since the very beginning of the demonstrations, wearing brand new outfits and super modern helmets, intimidating, beating up, arbitrarily arresting youth, and terrorising the population with teargas and gunning. 

But the Togolese have had enough for some time now, and resistance has been very active since 2005. They have understood the power of mass-mobilisation and images. Behaviour and arrests by the army are filmed and photographed by many equipped citizen observers. When youth are arrested and hauled into army trucks, their co-citizens share their burden and do all they can to trace them into security force premises. The institutionalised kidnapping of those who are the hope of a whole Nation, will no doubt end up with beatings and torture, far from public eyes. They will then be doubtlessly released and will tell their co-citizens how they were treated.

Will such reports be sufficient for people who have heard and gone through the same things for 49 long years, to hold up future demonstrations? Do they really still have something to lose? Nothing is less certain.

We unfortunately also all know that France, indefectible "Friend of Togo", can never accept self-determination in "sovereign and independent" Togoland. We have seen it before, as we talk of the traditional model of French neocolonial Africa.

In the meantime, we are all watching the people of Togo daily on YouTube and elsewhere on the net, admiring the courage and determination, wishing so hard that they will somehow win over Tyranny and Evil. We all wish their efforts will also encourage youth in other parts of Africa, in other democratic France-friendly tyrannies, like Gabon, Congo, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, and a few others we sometimes know nothing much about. All these nations were gracefully granted “independence” in 1960 by a brutal colonizer who pretended he was leaving, but who in reality never left.  Some of those countries suffered major population losses, such as Cameroon for example in a hidden and brutal independence war, where “enemies of the Nation” (and of friendly France of course), where still hunted down by the French “military cooperation”, and executed long after 1960. The responsibility of France in locally well-known war crimes has been witnessed by many, even by French pilots who took part in the dropping of napalm bombs on hundreds of villages, killing up to 500 000 thousand villagers.  

French crimes against humanity in Africa after independence are numerous and well documented, as well as her implication in the overthrow or murder of many “inconvenient” presidents and opposition leaders. The systematic support of France and her allies in the rigging of elections in countries where leaders have been trained and financed for the sake and up-keep of French economic interests is well-known by all. French neocolonialism through total control of the monetary system (CFA franc), local power and land possession of French industrial empires (Bolloré, Bouygues, Areva, etc.) using African resources exclusively for their own economic development, having politically eliminated all sources of obstruction, as well as profiting and implicitly encouraging local impunity in terms of labour regulations and human rights. All former French colonies have stepped into the same neocolonial pattern, and suffer from the same pack of gross abuse and violation, witnessed by a silent and complicit western international community.

In fact, who cares about powerless Africa? Actually the longer it remains powerless, the more profit will be made from it. Basically, the West cannot strategically be interested by any form of emancipation in Africa. Anything that looks like people’s empowerment must thus be undermined, in a spirit of infantilisation of any effort to grow out of what is just simply modern slavery. This is where very efficient revisionist media come in. The transformation of reality in the field is systematic.

So this is how western media ends up claiming that the people’s upheaval in Togo is in fact a civil war, or a tribal based war like in Democratic Republic of Congo or elsewhere, ignoring the fact that the pro-dictator people are often a minority of sometimes remunerated people from the same clan or tribe.

Defining the claim of a people to self-determination as a civil war, justifies in the eyes of France and its western economic partners the victory of the stronger part on the weaker part, which in turn allows them to validate repression against the weaker part, i.e. the unarmed civilian population.

We have seen several upheavals in France-controlled Sub-Saharan Africa these last five years, and most of them ended up in a bloodbath and/or in massive arrests of youth. Western media was always there to transform the protestors into looters, disorganised agitators, delinquent jobless people, and so on. In spite of many official reports on wide-spread human rights abuses, ranging from arbitrary arrests and detention, extra-judicial killing and so forth, the crimes have mostly ended up by being forgotten about or undermined in a spirit of implicit disqualification and institutionalised negrophobia.

So to come back to Togo, let’s continue watching the scene these next days and weeks, and let us be aware of the risk of qualification of the Togolese sentiment of “Too much is too much” as a fabricated civil war or other western revisionist phenomenon.

As for the African diaspora in Europe and in the United States, a special and continuous effort could be made to inform European and American people about what is really going on in Africa. Crimes in one part of the world should be known in all parts of the world. Then nobody can later say they did not know.  The capacity of thought of any individual in a country where freedom of opinion is the rule, can induce protest and pressure on Government if the person thinks that what is being done by Government is wrong. Thus, the decision between universal good or bad is the responsibility of every individual.

We all know by now that the power of the people, i.e. the sum up of a majority of conscious individuals is what represents ultimate power. 

The Writer Enoh Meyomesse Said to be in Yaounde for Military Trial

22 December 2011

By Patrick Sianne

I met and had my very first converstaion with this very affable Francophone gentleman, rare in this bicultural Cameroon society, it was not even one month upon my sudden return from China last year, October, 2011.

We met at a send-off party for the then out-going country direct of the German Friedrich-Herbert foundation based in Bastos, Yaounde.

During that maiden encounter, I remember he hurried to present the grudge he was carrying in his belly against the minority Anglophone community in Cameroon. And the gripe was that even though he had written a both detailing their woes and has taken the courage to precribe solutions to the Anglophone Minority Problem in the country even against the heavily mounted resistance of the ruling Beti clan, his clan, the main Anglophone elite have been shunning him and his book to the extent that just one copy of the booklet has been bought thus far and he was not given a chance and even debarred from attending an All Anglophone conference in Buea, to make himself heard on this burning and controversial Cameroon problem.

We joked on the contradiction here entailed: that victims of a plight to refuse to give an ear to a benefactor who is convinced he is coming to help lighten their burden.

To cut this long introduction short we took an appointment and Enoh appreared with many copies of his pamphlet that I helped to retail with relative ease to the Anglophes I know and for which he was so greatful that he even offered me a bonus and discount for doing such a great job at distribution.

It was large because he then understook my inroads with books and literary matters from then onwards and because he saw how determined and advanced I was with the book I was then still on the writing-draft phase on my trip and travail in the Far East (China: My Regrets, My Fears--- A Rising Mirage for Black Africa), it was for these reasons and others that this very soft-spoken man of mid-fifties or nearly sixty decided to make of me the Vice-President of the organizing committee of a three-day national conference of Cameroon writers of both the English and French Expresses that the Biya government did everything in its capacity to sabotage late last year; even though Enow still managed to stage something that did not represent the full motions we all had bargained for.

The Yaounde regime, fearful of this its very son of the Centre-South, South indeed, just did not want to see this guy take the limelight on anything this spectacular, even though strictly cultural; even though Enoh had tried to use the habiyual ruse of placing the even "Under the Patronage of His Excellency Paul Biya, President of the Republic of Cameroon" and even though he had insisted that this was to be as part of the on-going official activities marking the 50th anniversary of the republic.

As I gathered during that moment when I was closing working with him gearing up for the Literary Show that wasn't finally, Enoh has for long then before been blackmailed by the Yaounde regime, especially when he is said to have made an audio recording announcing the toppling of the Biya regime for which he was arrested and tormented for plotting a coup d'etat.

And then again sometime during this dying year while the political feud was going on in the Cote d'Ivoire between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouatara, he was picked up again at the Douala airport, passport seized and he was detained again for a few days for unannounced reasons. What filtered through during that particular arrest is that as supporter of Laurent Gbagbo, and as a true anti-Imperialist and true PanAfricanist he was about to fly to the Cote d'Ivoire to voice his stance when the Biya cabal opted to nip his effort at the bud stage by picking him up at point of departure.

Since then, I tried without efforts again to reach him personally for a one-to-one. We had just a few meagre phone conversations and even the few times he made firm commitments to come see me at my residence around the Yaounde Prefecture proved to be furtile. I afterwards gave up on looking for him, for my instincts gave me a hunch as to why he may be trying to avoid meeting me: As we was so ardent and public in his support for Laurent Gbagbo, so too did he come to learn through our common sources and middlemen and women that I too was a fire rod in the opposing camp selling the stakes for Alassane Ouatara. This looked like the Cameroonian version of the love-hate opposition that is reported in the Ivorian drama fixing Soro Gillaume (Pro-Ouatara) and Blaise Blegoude (Pro-Gbagbo).

Perhaps for this last reason in particular, Enoh and Sianne stayed apart for this long. Even the presidential elections of October 9, where I was suurprised to learn via the press that he is one of the initial 51 or so applicants did not happen to bring us together, even though phone conversation alone. This, even though both of us are ardent believer that Biya Must Go. I was personally surprised that he put forward his candidature and never consulted with me before, during or even after the whole process of the reckless Decision 2011, the fake Cameroon Presidential Election that Biya roganized to win and won the way very few are satisfied with.

Of course therefore that Enoh was one of the disgruntled Cameroonians that that bogus pull. But such frustrations are not the things in my opinion that should lead him to do the things whatever they be that this wicked regime is using to give this noble birth of the South some much trouble of late.

One of our common friend, whose name I prefer withholding for she is a prominent national political player told me just this afternoon that they government forces have brought Enoh from the hole they were holding him in the distant East Region to Yaounde where he is expected to be judged in a military tribunal. Confirming reports via this face book mails also affirm that Enoh was spotted this afternoon being taking into and out of the Yaounde Military tribunal.

As a personal acquaintance and a sweet character to deal with I am still at a loss about what he may have done so bad this time around for his torment to be getting bigger than usual from the hand of this government that hates him and knows Enoh also hates the government back with equal or even hogher vehemence.

Tomorrow or soon after, we may get to the belly of the true story that may still what to see as just an attempt of this wicked regime to get even with this other critical artist like it did with Lapiro de Mbanga, using the pretext or cover of the 2008 nation food riot to lock him up in a tight hole at the Douala New Bell prison for several years, for crimes that the Mbanga-based musician said to me during a recent interview in his home with his wife present and looking at me straight in the eye: "Patrick Sianne, je n'ai rien fait de ce genre donc ce régime m'accuse. Le dossier est bien preparé, bien avancé, et on attend le bon moment pour te le mettre sur le dos. C'est fabriqué de toutes pièces!"

I smell a rat here, as same as with the Lapiro file.

Democracy Without Technology is Void

December 11, 2011

By Philip Emeagwali

I was born in 1954 in colonial Africa. One of my most cherished mementos from the colony of Nigeria is one of the pennies I received for my school lunch allowance. The coins bore the likeness of Edward VIII, who became King of England on January 20, 1936, and were minted in anticipation of his reign. However, Edward abdicated the throne on December 11th of that year before he could be crowned. He gave up the British kingdom to marry the love of his life, an American divorcee.

In 1960, a typical day in my life began at our compound on Yoruba Road, in Sapele. Our compound was adjacent to the Eagle Club, a night club where I ran errands for music legends, such as master trumpeters E.T. Mensah, Eddy Okonta, and Zeal Onyia. They would give me a penny to buy two sticks of cigarettes and I would bring back their half-penny change.

Some mornings, my mother would give me a penny with the instructions: "Buy rice with a farthing, beans with a farthing, and bring back a half-penny change." When I told this story to my son, Ijeoma, he interrupted, saying, incredulously "Daddy, you can't get change for a penny!" I then show him my souvenir: a British West African central-holed coin, bearing the head of King George V and minted in 1936 with the inscription "one tenth of a penny." The central hole was for stringing the coins together, to carry them. The world has changed greatly since my youth!

Nigeria has existed for 96 years and has been independent for 50 years. Nigerians must look back to the first 46 years, spent under colonial rule, to understand the 50 post-colonial years of their self-rule. Looking backward, like the Sankofa, is a prerequisite for understanding the way forward.

With self-rule came responsibility. We're now being held accountable for our actions and inaction, our coups and corruption, and our civil wars in Biafra, Congo, and Rwanda.

Looking backward 96 years will enable Nigeria to understand when and where it's train derailed and how to put it back on track. I believe our train derailed because, although the 46 pre-independence years were a brain-gain period, the 50 post-independence years have been marked by the largest brain drain since the Atlantic slave trade.

Looking forward 50 years, I foresee that nations delivering information and communication technologies will indirectly rule Africa. I see the cellular phone, the computer, and the internet enabling Africa to replace selection with election. I see the internet enabling citizens to become reporters, decentralizing the media. I see technology enabling freedom of the press and democracy in Africa..

Kwame Nkrumah said, "Socialism without science is void." I say, "Democracy without technology is void."

Winds are Blowing in Equatorial Guinea

November 4, 2011

Source: Human Rights Watch

Concern over politically motivated arrest of opposition member ahead of referendum

The government of Equatorial Guinea should immediately release an opposition party member and civil society activist arrested on November 1, 2011, in what appeared to be a politically motivated act, Human Rights Watch and EG Justice said today. Marcial Abaga Barril, the representative of the main opposition party on the national electoral body, was detained without a warrant outside of his home, allegedly in connection with a murder investigation. 

Abaga's arrest and detention comes just days after the start of campaigning for a Nov. 13 referendum to approve constitutional changes proposed by President Teodoro Obiang's government. Abaga's party has strongly opposed the constitutional changes. Sources close to him said that on the day of his arrest he had been helping to plan a series of public events to press for a "no" vote on the referendum. 

"Marcial Abaga's politically motivated arrest is yet another example of President Obiang's offensive against opposition voices," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "The allegation that Abaga is connected with a murder simply has no credibility." 

The Obiang government has sought to silence those opposed to the referendum. Uniformed police officers and others in plainclothes disrupted events held this week by Abaga's party, Convergence for Social Democracy (Convergencia Para la Democracia Social, CPDS), and forced the participants to disperse, a witness told EG Justice, a US-based group that works for human rights and the rule of law in Equatorial Guinea. 

Abaga is on the party's national executive committee. It is one of only two political parties in the country that are independent of the governing party. He is a municipal council member in Malabo and also sits on the National Electoral Commission of Equatorial Guinea as the representative of his party. The electoral body, which is dominated by the ruling Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (Partido Democrático de Guinea Ecuatorial, PDGE) and representatives of allied parties, lacks the independence necessary to oversee votes impartially, Human Rights Watch and EG Justice said. 

Human Rights Watch and EG Justice emphasized that there is no independent judiciary in Equatorial Guinea. The government commonly carries out arbitrary arrests and denies detainees due process, holding them indefinitely without telling them the charges against them. Basic fair trial standards are disregarded. Torture remains a serious problem despite a national law prohibiting it. Abaga has not reported being ill-treated, according to the sources. 

The constitutional changes coming up for a November 13 vote would potentially allow 69-year-old Obiang to serve for two more terms of seven years each. They also would create a new post for a hand-picked vice president, widely considered to be intended for his eldest son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, who is his presumed successor. 

The younger Obiang has been the subject of corruption and money-laundering investigations in France, Spain, and the United States. These investigations have so far led to the seizure of a fleet of luxury vehicles outside his Paris residence and a US government effort to seize more than $70 million in assets. 

In October, the president appointed the younger Obiang, known as Teodorín, to head the ruling party's campaign to promote the referendum. In 2010, Teodorín was made the vice president of the ruling party. 

Equatorial Guinea has been roundly criticized for its conduct of elections. President Obiang was re-elected in November 2009 with 95.4 percent of the vote in an election with weak international monitoring, raising "the suspicion of systematic voting fraud," according to the US State Department. Ahead of the vote, the government stifled and harassed the country's beleaguered political opposition, denied the opposition equal access to the media, and imposed serious constraints on international observers. 

Abaga also is active as the head of a youth organization engaged in human rights education, Sensation of the Young Future (Sensación del Joven Futuro, SEJOF). And he is an advocate for greater transparency about the government's management of oil revenue through participation in the international Publish What You Pay Coalition and the now-defunct National Commission for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Equatorial Guinea was a candidate country for membership in EITI until 2010, when it was expelled from the initiative. 

Abaga was detained outside his home at approximately 10 p.m. on November 1, by plainclothes security officials who said they were from the police but did not provide an explanation for the arrest other than to say they needed to question him as part of an investigation, a family member said. He was taken to the Malabo jail known as "Guantánamo" because of its reputation for abuses against detainees, where he has had access to visits from family members, colleagues, and his lawyer. Equatorial Guinea's law allows for a suspect to be held in detention without charge for up to 72 hours. 

Sources close to Abaga said he was informed on the afternoon of November 2 - more than 12 hours after he was detained - that he was being held in connection with a police investigation into an alleged killing two weeks earlier of a cook working for President Obiang. No such incident had previously been publicly reported. Abaga firmly denies the allegation, which Human Rights Watch and EG Justice described as implausible.

The Vampire of Francophone Africa

October 24, 2011
By Christian Mbouende

The government of France has for too long dealt with Africa in inconsiderate, disgraceful and unrepentantly diabolic ways. This was recently repeated during and after the recent presidential election in Cameroon. This government is a disgrace to humanity and its people. Their filthy ways is of the highest degree for a nation who has made a place in the world at the expense of Africans by extortion, deceit, blood shedding, killings, wars, division, oppression and other diabolic devices which have contributed to keep Africa from progressing and in constant deprivation. In all confidence, the devil itself must be drawing lessons in diabolism from this government. 

This government of a country that advertises itself as the example of human refinement in intellect, fashion, mannerism and good living has been a disgrace to its people and humanity as it continues one administration after another to work on its eternal goal of sucking Africa of its God's blessings, by any necessary means, both in peace and war times which it orchestrates at will to meet its materialistic and financial aims. But the so called peace times in countries like The Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Gabon, Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Algeria, until recently Tunisia and Rwanda, and many more have only been opportune times for this government and the dictators it has handpicked to tyrannize a truly peaceful people who simply demands to live in dignity and freedom in their lands and to choose their own destiny. Whenever the aims of this imperialistic government are not achievable in Africa in periods of stability it would ignite wars and chaos to assert greater influence and extort. The French government for nearly half a century has maintained defense treaties with African dictators in order to discourage internal rebellion, when in fact the only defense French speaking Africa truly needs is to be freed from the tyranny of its dictators and of the French government. Of course, those dictators too are subjected to the sanguinary might of France if they no longer meet the objectives of France. 

President Obama coming to the White House gave many Africans hope that France tyranny toward Africa can subside. It's clear that he has tried behind the scene to influence the current French administration to allow Africans to get rid of their dictators if they choose to. This diabolic and nearly century old ways the French government has continuously dealt with Africa is clearly a well-entrenched and hugely lucrative habit it is not ready to let go as the recent upheavals in Tunisia and Ivory Coast and its approval of and involvement in rigged presidential elections in Gabon and just recently Cameroon confirm. In Gabon it has manipulated the last presidential election result with the use of its sophisticated technology to put into the presidency the son of the deceased dictator who ruled Gabon for several decades with an iron fist and the full support of the many successive French administrations. Last week, after less than a third of Cameroonians voted in presidential election which is considered with undeniable and abundant evidences by most observers, independent news medias and opposition parties as non-transparent and pervasively imbued with massive frauds, irregularities, logistical nightmares and unfair rules, the French government from Paris was quick to assert its opinion by declaring the election to have been acceptable and without serious concern, this in its attempts to influence public opinion in order to maintainin in power the ruler of Cameroon of the past 29 years. Within short time after that the American ambassador in Cameroon before a news conference asserted a totally different opinion of the election by declaring that the election was full of irregularities and the results were unreliable. The next day the French government recanted its prior statement by nearly reasserting the opinion of the American ambassador. Well, this is simply another case of the French government being caught with its pant down in its dealings with Africa, and the sight of it is never pretty.

Any followers of Africa's events understand that without the assistance of the French government most of Africa's dictators would not be long lasting and without those dictators who do not reflect any modernism let alone any viable legacy for their decades long reign, Africa would be confidently marching toward a meritocratic and progressive society and its best talents would find it viable to return to and remain in Africa to pursue their aspirations without being subjected to constant fear of persecution, bureaucratic nightmares, corruption at every level of daily life and from its sham institutions, tribalism, mediocrity, disregard of human and property rights, imprisonment without charge and judgement, kidnapping, lawlessness frequently perpetrated by those expected to legislate, judge and enforce the law. 

I am confident that this American administration will continue to pressure the evil French government to mend its way toward Africa. But, lasting change will be possible if the French people become less tolerant of this state of affairs for the sake of our common humanity. There are many Africans, their children and wives who are French citizens, they too must awake and organize and participate in the politics of France and help stop this ever insatiable monster that is their government, the diabolic government of France. And Africans living under this tyranny on the daily basis must accept that this evil will not depart from them as long as they remain fractured, unwilling to bond together for the common purpose of liberating themselves.

When Protest is Called “Disorder”

October 16, 2011 

By Juliette Abandokwe 

Douala, Cameroon 

On October 4th, five days before the general election, seventeen of Mboua Massok’s young militants were arrested as they were disseminating invitations for the next pre-electoral meeting to be held two days later. Mboua Massok, also commonly called “Acting Combatant”, has become over the years the symbol of resistance to the trivialization of the intolerable and ruthless rule of Paul Biya. 

According to the newspapers, the seventeen arrested youth are facing charges for having caused disorder; their trial will take place on Monday 17 October. 

A young 22 year-old Cameroonian on Facebook commented this arrest by saying that “they weren’t fighting for liberty but for disorder (according to the newspapers). The next one who’ll act in that sense will be punished and charged”. 

It is nice to know that in Cameroon one is punished first and then charged! 

This kind of talk just shows how well Paul Biya’s rule is using young Cameroonians in his efforts to disseminate terror, by convincing them to believe how bad it is to have a different opinion, and to stand up for it. These youth are then left to criss-cross all over the place for systematic intimidation and demonization of independent thinking. The warning of this young man is just drenched in abuse of power and impunity, supported by the climate of terror instilled by the brutal national system of repression. 

Biya's newspapers and television: A very efficient and well financed brainwashing scheme 

To protest against the high-jacking of basic liberties, against institutionalized brutality, and against the rape of a people's right to chose its leader freely, is not "fighting for disorder" as the Cameroonian state controlled media are proclaiming. That is the language of coldblooded dictation, aimed at the destruction of any attempt for self-determination. 

For the sake of their business, Paul Biya and France need a system in Cameroon where Cameroonians are superfluous. They would lose too much money if the people of Cameroon succeeded in standing up to ask for more justice and fair partnerships. So all heads must be kept down, and any head that comes up will be chopped off. That is in essence what the state media are telling Cameroonians. 

In reality, the self- and France- proclaimed part-time president has declared war on “his” people, by continuing the 51-year old denial of the right for the Cameroonian people to organize an efficient, coherent thus strong opposition. The global picture of today’s’ opposition is the direct result of a systematic psychosocial destruction of society, operated mainly through imported and well used propaganda methods. 

As protest is called “disorder”, everybody naturally agrees that is has to be put in order. That is part of the brainwashing procedure. In reality, Biya is forcibly suppressing any kind of protest, with the support of a completely rotten "justice" system, where it is his friends who are in charge. As he considers the Cameroonian people as superfluous, it would be contradictory if he cared about their fundamental rights. 

Biya, “The Choice of The People” 

For Paul Biya, the people of Cameroonian have no rights; his has done the utmost efforts to prevent them from asking for their civil liberties, by managing to make them believe that the misery they are living in, is what is called “peace”. 

Intimidation, repression and propaganda will not stop the wheel to turn round. When the “too much is too much” will have gone over the brim, the time will come when a miserable tyrant called Paul Biya will himself be punished and charged in the bitterest way. That moment is slowly coming, however sarcastic people think about it. 

That is except if he runs off without paying his bill, which at his age can happen anytime.

Evil ruling never lasts for ever

In Nigeria, Militancy Raises Specter of Civil War

12 October 2011 

David Francis

On Oct. 2, Nigeria celebrated the 51st anniversary of its freedom from British rule. A large gala was planned in Abuja, the fast-growing Nigerian capital located in the center of the country.

But, days before the celebrations, Boko Haram, a Muslim extremist group based in the country's north, and the Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), based in the country's oil-rich south, both threatened to disrupt the festivities with violence. Boko Haram had already made it clear that it was capable of attacking Abuja on Aug. 26, when it exploded a bomb at the United Nations building there, killing 23. And just a week before the scheduled gala event, a bomb scare at the country's National Assembly sent lawmakers scrambling for safety.

MEND had long ago showed itself capable of such an attack. It is responsible for a string of bombings, kidnappings and killings against the Nigerian government as well as against oil companies in the south over the past decade. And as Boko Haram has emerged, MEND has become even more active in an effort to reinsert itself into Nigeria's national conversation.

Paul Biya, the Killer of Innocent Cameroonians

3 October 

Tila Bokado

Voice Of Cameroon is calling on the United Nations, the United States government, human rights organizations and media groups around the world to advise Paul Biya who have continuously torture and savagely murdered innocent Cameroonians , to watch his evil ways because we are ready to take down his armed chickens. We understand that they're some members of the Cameroon armed chickens who are dedicated to brutalize and murder innocent Cameroonians in order to please Paul Biya the tyrannic dictator. That will be the greatest mistake if that happen because our Freedom Troopers will use every means necessary to equalize any bloody killings in the South Cameroon camp by the evil regime. The Cameroon People's Liberation Troopers want the following issues to be resolved immediately between paul biya and Southern Cameroonians.

1.  Paul Biya must immediately release every Southern Cameroonian and political prisoners who are in prison or house of arrest. Our people have every rights to walk freely and enjoy their natural fatherland without fear of anyone.

2.     WE need the names of every Southern Cameroonian and political activists who are held captive by the illegal regime of Dictator paul biya. We have seen recent videos of filthy, crowded house of arrest and detention camps where our citizens are held captive by Paul Biya.

3.    If any Southern Cameroonian or citizen of Cameroon who have been arrested lost their life in the hands of paul biya and his armed chickens, that will be the beginning of a bloody war. The Cameroon People's Liberation Troopers will not sit and watch paul biya murder our citizens anymore. Those Cameroonians who are supporting Paul Biya will automatically be classified as enemies of the State because they are knowingly promoting violence by supporting a brutal dictator.

4.   We are giving paul biya less than 24 hours to meet our demands and if Paul Biya decided not to let them go, The People's Liberation Troopers will forcefully release every Southern Cameroonian and political prisoner in Cameroon.

Live Either Free or Die

8 octobre 2011

Patrick Sianne

Let Paul Biya go, now! 

Let him vamoose and leave the Cameroonians held in bondage for this too long in an uncaring dictatorship, FREE. This Freedom that I am calling for is not just for me and my family members and friends. It is deep and meaningful Freedom that allows people to think and act and even fly freely without turning around and looking back and left and right to protect their back and sides from a dictator, be it this Biya’s or the one that may come after.

Liberty has no price. Many are those of the ruling cabal, friends inclusive, who have come to me in private and public, day time and in the thick of darkness at bight, to ask me, Patrick Sianne, since coming back from China, “Patrick, but what do you really want? We are prepared to fix your conditions, if you are ready to tell us, we settle it and you remain silent.”

My answer to them has been then, now and tomorrow viz: “Let Paul Biya go, now! Let him vamoose and leave the Cameroonians held in bondage for this too long in an uncaring dictatorship, FREE. I want Freedom, so, has been my answer. This Freedom that I am calling for is not just for me and my family members and friends. It is deep and meaningful Freedom that allows people to think and act and even fly freely without turning around and looking back and left and right to protect their back and sides from a dictator, be it this Biya’s or the one that may come after.”

It is a natural law for all to be free. Man does not have to be a burden to man, as Biya has become one big bug to a cross section of Cameroon, just in an effort to preserve a power that he inherited accidentally on that objectionable, damned November 6, 1982.

“Je pense donc je suis,” said Descartes, the famous French Mathematician-Philosopher to illustrate how vital is Freedom to Humans in particular and to society at large. Limiting Freedom is holding everyone and everything back from enlightenment and advancement.

So much of import is the necessity to feel free that one of the fifty states of the United States of America, Newhampshire, a State in the East Coast part of the USA called New England, adopted this telling slogan as its State Motto: “Live Either Free or Die.”

This notion is not of just today. It has a historical significance birthing right from the days of the American Revolution, the then nascent nation’s War of Independence from colonial and Imperialistic England or the United Kingdom.

Revolution is first and foremost a question of freedom of the mind. Bob Marley, the great legend of Reggae, underlined this fact in one of his hit tunes of liberation and redemption when he asked us to “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, non but ourselves can free our minds.”

Sick and tired of oppression, exploitation and cheating by the British colonial masters, patriotic American nationalist of high intellects like Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton (Founding Fathers) , as revolutionary ideologues, set out first of all, to provide the ideas markets from which the people were to buy and use to use to free their mind to the critical point when they gather the necessary courage to start challenging the evil system fearing nothing else, but fear itself.

That was the trend of thoughts that pre-set the chain of events, little-step-by- little-step culminating in the famous Boston Tea Party when precipitated the transformations leading to the war and liberation of America under the able leadership of the person who became the first president, General George Washington, the man in honour for whom the capital of th present all-powerful United States of America is named in thanks for his selfless bravery and commitment to the noble cause of FREEDOM.

Message Approved by LVP: Libertas – Veritas – Probitas

Motto: One for all, all for One; All for one, one for All. What goes around, comes around!

Cameroon: Biya's Liberticidal Cruelty and his Free and Fair Election of 9 October 2011

5 October 2011

Patrick Sianne

While Mr. Biya has been always saying that he would like to be remembered the days after his too long a one-man show and reign over Cameroon to be remembered as the man who brought democracy in Cameroon he and his boys do all before and behind the scenes to kill the very freedoms he purported to want to nurture and culture. 


Some sort of democratic representation and representative is the ploy in play here, like any other system or policy that Mr. Biya has said he is instituting in Cameroon since November 6, 1982 that he took over from El Hadj Ahmadou Ahidjo as second present of the Second Republic of Cameroon.

Now that the English speakers of the Third Republic are staking their calim to a moral imperative to take the helm from Biya and preach by example by being the real purveyor belt for sustainable democratic institutions and traditions in Cameroon wth courageous woman and men like Kah Walla, Fru Ndi, Ayah Paul, Ben Muna and George Nyamndi, the Biya Boys are behind the scene wanting to thwart all the forces for change that is surfacing at the bud stage wherever and whenever they germinate or attempt to burst out.

Here is a new case arising in where the wonder lads of the very combative, radical Mboua Massock Movement have been picked up and put under keys at a gendarme jailroon somewhere in Bonanjo, Douala, as per this missive I just received via facebook from a trustworthy source.

This group of 17 were manhandled and taken off the street for nuisance, just because they were trying to say it loud, to speak like James Brown in his hit song of the sixties or seventies, tittled Say it Loud, I'm Black and Proud.

These proud and promissory and patriotic Cameroonian's were in the streets distributing flyers announcing a show-down with dictator Biya come October six, tomorrow Thursday, when the police visited with them unceremoniously and took them away against their basic human rights, not without a bare-arms resistance.

This other Douala public and unconstitutional cruelty by these forces of everything else but Law and order comes on the of the heavy crack down that is still to settle in Buea after the actvists of the Southern Cameroons National Council were prevented to hold their 50th anniversary commemorative grand rally by the same Biya liberticidal forces.

In Buea, the heavy arms used in the sweep was indiscriminate, catching even the watch-dogs of society, protectors and defenders of freedom of expression that are journalist in their noble role of news gathering and dissemination.

Patrick Sianne, Elvis Tah and Adams Bouddih, of The Post newspaper and Solomon Amabo of Equinoxe television are four of the know reporters impolitely accosted, violently molested and humiliated and then whisked of for detention and questioning and intimidation, just for being at the right place at the right time and attempting to do their job, provider of their daily living, how it is supposed to be ina real democracy, and not the simulacrum Paul Biya wants to seal and sell for real, this new election season again, as he has done to bag one genration of dilly-dallying at the head of the state. This callously executed political cacophony and buffoonery must come to nought this yea by any means necessary, see Malcolm X. It is the opinion of Libertas - Veritas - Probitas that the battle should leave the mainstreet to the mean street, where we the people can in quick shift respond to fire by fire, bully for bully, tit for tat.

Paul Biya of Cameroon: Dictator of the month

26 September 2011

David Wallechinsky

On October 9, the nation of Cameroon in west-central Africa will hold a presidential election. There will be 23 candidates, but there isn’t much doubt which one will win…78-year-old Paul Biya, who has ruled Cameroon for 29 years. In fact, Biya is a specialist in creative rigging of elections. Once he even hired his own set of American election observers to report that an election he won was free and democratic (see below). This time around he has come up with a novel method of making sure that the outside world will be impressed by his defeat of a large number of opponents.

To run for president, a politician must put up 5 million Central African Francs (CFAs). He then receives 25 million CFAs to run his campaign. According to Cameroonian journalist Ntemfac Ofege, “All the candidates have to do is rush to the nearest bank, microfinance institution, credit union or whatever, and demand a short term loan of 5 million CFA. They collect 25 million CFA from the state; pay back their short-term loan and report a profit of at least 15 million CFA.”In my book Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Living Dictators, I included a chapter about Biya, which I present here.

The Nation

As a political entity, the West African nation of Cameroon was patched together by European colonial powers. The population of more than 16 million speaks 279 languages. Slightly more than half of Cameroonians are Christians, a quarter follow traditional belief systems, and about 22% are Muslims. There are approximately 260 distinct ethnic groups. Since a chi eving independence in 1960, Cameroon has been ruled by one party and only two presidents. Cameroon is Africa ’s largest producer of timber and it is the world’s fifth-largest producer of the cocoa that goes into making chocolate. The nation has the reputation of being one of the most corrupt countries in the world and actually earned Transparency International’s number-one ranking as corruption champion two years in a row, in 1998 and 1999.

Pre - Biya

The Germans claimed Cameroon as a colony in 1884. Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles divided the colony between France and Great Britain . The French granted East Cameroon independence on January 1, 1960. On October 1, 1961, the British gave up control of West Cameroon and it joined East Cameroon to form a single country. French-educated Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Muslim from the north, took over as president and stayed in power for twenty-two years until he unexpectedly resigned on November 6, 1982, apparently because his French doctors told him that he had a terminal disease. Ahidjo did retain his position as head of Cameroon ’s lone political party. He was replaced as president by the prime minister, Paul Biya, a Roman Catholic from the Beti ethnic group in the south. Ahidjo did not have a terminal illness, but by the time he realized this, Biya had squeezed him out of the party leadership and forced him to flee the country. Ahidjo eventually died in Senegal in 1989.

The man

Born February 13, 1933, Biya studied in Paris and received a degree in public law. After working for two years in the presidential palace, he became director of the office of the minister of education and then moved up to secretary-general of the Education Ministry. After serving as secretary-general of the presidency, Biya was named prime minister by Ahidjo in June 1975.

At the time that Biya assumed office in 1992, Cameroon enjoyed a booming economy with solid exports of cocoa, timber, and coffee and a growing petroleum industry. Thanks to corruption and ethnic cronyism, Biya destroyed the economy. While Biya and his friends grew rich on oil money, the Cameroonian economy shrank for nine straight years beginning in 1987.

In January 1984, Biya stood for election for president and managed to win 99.98% of the vote. It is not known what happened to the two-hundredths of one percent of the voters who managed to vote against him. To be on the safe side, Biya eliminated the position of prime minister so that no rival politician could create his own power base. Three months after the election, he put down a mutiny by the mostly Islamic Republican Guard, which he blamed on Ahidjo, who was condemned to death in absentia. To demonstrate that he was not a dictator, Biya changed the name of the only legal political party from the National Cameroonian Union to the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC). In 1988, he was reelected president, although his vote percentage slipped to only 98.75%.

Controlling the opposition

Under pressure at home and from abroad, Biya legalized opposition parties in 1990, but strikes and pro-democracy protests in 1991 left more than 100 dead. Forty-eight parties took part in March 1992 legislative elections. The RDPC won 88 of the 180 seats and, with the help of sympathetic small parties, cobbled together a working majority. Presidential elections had been scheduled for a year later, but Biya moved them up to October 1992 to give the opposition less time to organize. The U.S.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs arrived in Cameroon to help train election officials, but stayed to observe the election and to watch in dismay as the government ignored normal democratic procedures. “It would not be an exaggeration,” the observers would later report, “to suggest that this election system was designed to fail.” The government-controlled television gave Biya 142 minutes of time to present his case, while allowing the opposition parties a combined total of 12 minutes. Names of eligible voters were crossed off the registry and there were widespread reports of multiple voting and voting by underage residents. In some areas known to be anti-Biya, polling sites were moved without warning to reduce turnout. The territory of Rey-Bouba in the district of Mayo Rey blocked all political party pollwatchers from entering. Results by polling site were never published.

The election took place on October 11. A week later, George Achu Mofor, the governor of East Province , resigned to protest the way the central government had forced him to use any means necessary to ensure a Biya victory in his province. The election results were announced on October 23. Biya won with 39.9% of the vote. John Fru Ndi, the English-speaking head of the Social Democratic Front, was given 35.9%, an affront which landed him in house arrest; and a third major candidate, former prime minister Bello Bouba Maigari, won 19.2%. Demonstrations in English-speaking Western Cameroon were so large that Biya imposed a state of emergency in the region and ordered mass arrests of opposition supporters. Despite the dubious aspects of the election, the French government congratulated Biya on his victory. At the time, the French oil company Elf Aquitaine monopolized oil exploration off the coast of Cameroon .

In 1996, students at the University of Cameroon ’s Yaounde 1 campus boycotted classes to protest a hike in fees that was so broad that it included usage charges both for the library and for toilets. When the strike spread to other campuses, the government sent in troops who beat a student to death. By the time of the 1997 parliamentary elections, Biya had learned his lesson. His party manipulated the voting much more efficiently and gained a clear majority of the seats. In the presidential election later that year, Biya claimed to win 92.6% of the votes.

By this same time, Biya was cracking down on privately owned newspapers, arresting and imprisoning journalists. In one particularly notorious case, Pius Njame, the editor of an independent French-language newspaper, reported that Biya had suffered a “malaise” and a possible heart attack while attending the 1997 Cameroon Cup soccer final. Njame was convicted of “spreading false news” and served ten months in prison.

The Pipeline

Although Cameroon attracted the attention of the oil industry, its reserves were relatively limited. But the industry had other plans for Cameroon . Northeast of Cameroon , the landlocked nation of Chad was found to have plenty of oil. A consortium of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Elf Aquitaine drew up plans for a $3.7 billion project that would sink 300 wells in Chad and run the oil to the Atlantic coast via a 665-mile-long pipeline they would build across Cameroon . Because the regimes of both Biya and Chad ’s Idriss Déby were notorious abusers of human rights, and because of the high potential for environmental degradation, Shell and Elf pulled out of the project. With billions of dollars of profits on the line, ExxonMobil found two new partners, Chevron and Petronas of Malaysia, and plunged ahead in promoting the plan. Construction of the pipeline, which began in October 2000, threatened the destruction of the lives of 100,000 Bagyeli Pygmies living in the region and in some cases their eviction. The World Bank backed the project, making it the bank’s single-largest investment in sub-Saharan Africa , and the pipeline was completed in July 2003.

Meanwhile, human rights groups were reporting systemic torture, the kidnapping and disappearance of political dissidents, and a legal code that permitted forced female genital mutilation and allowed rapists to avoid prosecution if they marry their victims. Biya keeps such tight control over the country that his office approves all public appointments all the way down to village police officers.

In the words of lawyer Charles Taku, “To get such a job or a business license…you have to show that you support the president actively, that you love him and his party.”

Human rights, the vanishing Act

In 2002, Paul Biya caught a break. Cameroon happened to be serving a two-year term as a member of the United Nations Security Council when U.S. president George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq and needed the support of Security Council members. Biya, a longtime friend of France ’s president, Jacques Chirac, found himself being wooed by Bush and visited him in the White House the day that the U.S. began its bombing of Baghdad . U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell praised Cameroon as “a place of stability” and promised that “we will do everything we can to strengthen the government.” The criticisms of Biya’s human rights record, which had been catalogued in the reports of Powell’s own State Department, were swept aside as if they had never happened.

Creative election rigging

In 2004, Biya faced a new presidential election and came up with a new and novel tactic in the world of rigged elections. In previous elections he had perfected the arts of suppressing opposition campaigning and stacking the voter rolls. But he faced criticism from international election-monitoring groups. In July 2004, he signed a $400,000 deal with the Washington, D.C., law and lobbying firm of Patton Boggs to improve Cameroonian ties with the United States at a time when the State Department had said that Biya’s security forces had “committed numerous unlawful killings and were responsible for torture, beatings and other abuses,” and that the government “continued to arrest and detain arbitrarily various opposition politicians.” One of the Patton Boggs lobbyists, former U.S. Representative Greg Laughlin, a Texas Democrat, put together a bipartisan observer group called the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress. With Biya’s government covering the bills, the Association flew in six ex-congressmen, who observed the October 11 presidential election in which Biya claimed a 71% landslide, declared it a free election, and flew home.

One of the former congressmen, Ronnie Shows, a Democrat from Mississippi , enthused, “This is what democracy is about.” Another observer group from the Commonwealth nations, led by former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark, saw the election process differently. They said that the registration process, which the U.S. group had arrived too late to observe, had “missed a considerable portion of the voting-age population of Cameroon .” “We ran into swarms of people who had been declared ineligible to vote,” said Clark . The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Cameroon also accused Biya’s government of vote-rigging.

The ectoplasm

Biya’s first wife, Jeanne-Irene, died in 1992, leaving behind two sons and a daughter. Two years later the sixty-one-year-old Biya married a twenty-four-year-old named Chantal and began spending an increasing amount of time on vacation. Cameroon ’s leading novelist, the late Mongo Beti, once described Biya as an “ectoplasm” and another time as a “zombie.” Because Beti also had harsh words for John Fru Ndi, Biya let him get away with it, although Beti was roughed up by police at demonstrations.

Cameroon: How Paul Biya Treats Unarmed Civilian Protestors

27 July 2011

Juliette Abandokwe

The video below, which was made on February 23rd of this year, shows how Cameroonian police and armed forces behave towards unarmed civilian protestors. 

It particularly indicates with which brutality Paul Biya, who has been the President of Cameroon for 29 years now, is treating those people of his who have been "democratically and freely" electing him for the past 3 decades. 

This years' general election is taking place on the October 9th. 

Paul Biya, having manipulated the Constitution in December 2007, removing the terms' limit, which allows him to present himself for as many terms that he wishes, declared himself the candidate of the ruling RDPC (sarcastically, the Democratic Reassembly of the Cameroonian People) only a couple of weeks ago. 

Widespread repression has been occurring since February, with extensive intimidation methods as well as unarmed civilians being brutalized, imprisoned and tortured, together with systematically molested and house arrested opposition leaders. 

France, the former colonial power and until present neo-colonial power, which has gigantic commercial interests and contracts in the custody of the Cameroonian government, know exactly, together with the European Union and the rest of the international community, what is going on in Cameroon. Several detailed reports have been issued in the last three years on the absolutely appalling human rights situation. 

Systematic manipulation of the independent electoral commission ELECAM has been going for over a year now, with the choice of its members by Mr. Biya being regularly questioned by civil society and opposition leaders. 

If or when Biya wins the next elections, how far will the international community go to validate the result of the election, and how concerned will they feel the gross human rights violations, and remembering that France and its partners condemned and ousted President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast out of power for allegedly having rigged and lost the 2010 autumn general elections after 10 years of power, along alleged crimes against humanity. 

Incidentally, it is also to be remembered that France is responsible for extended massacres in Cameroon during the war of independence, where between 300 000 to 400 000 Cameroonians villagers died in the napalm bombings by the French air force. No official history book mentions these events, but many survivors as well has French pilots present at the time, have officially witnessed. 

To what extent is it a crime against humanity for the international community to accept and to validate, even "only" implicitly, an election which is the absolute result of obvious, widespread and systematic fraud, accompanied by a long and very painful history of extremely gross power abuse and basic human rights' violations? 

Why should Gbagbo be removed for those reasons, and to a lesser extent Kadhafi, while people like Paul Biya, Idriss Deby of Tchad, François Bozizé of Central African Republic, the latter two having proclaimed themselves successor to their previous term after systematic and arrogant fraud at the beginning of this year, ar keft in power? 

These questions are obviously linked to the quality of warranty offered by these "democratically and freely" elected "presidents" on the availability of natural resources' contracts and deals in unclear and corrupt conditions. We should therefore ask ourselves to what extent the power of a brutalized and silenced people can be exercised in these different conditions. Although internal interacting factors should also be considered, ranging from longstanding toxic behaviors induced by will-suppressing colonial rule, as well as widespread greed and lack of national conscience, the weight of external validation and acceptance should be considered as overwhelming. 

This video is to show how Biya is intending to continue ruling over his people
 while he is trying very hard to become his own successor at any cost.