Barrister Abeng’s bank account still frozen, Seven years later
By Nfor Hanson Nchanji
The Bank account of Barrister Roland Abeng was sealed in 2017, months after the legal luminary requested that the OHADA Uniform Act be translated into English. (OHADA is a system of corporate law and implementing institutions adopted by seventeen West and Central African nations in 1993 in Port Louis, Mauritius before it was revised in 2008 in Quebec, Canada.)
Since its adoption, the law has always been in the French language despite Cameroon being a bilingual country.
On October 1, 2016, one of Cameroon’s finest lawyers, Barrister Roland Abeng organized a meeting at the Akwa Palace Hotel in Douala to throw more light on the importance of such a translation, to Common Law Lawyers. But the meeting was banned and the organizer’s account was blocked.
Despite a decision to release his funds, the execution has not been done since January 2017.
On August 16, 2023, Barrister Abeng said “I was informed by a reliable source (supported documents)
by the Cameroon Judicial Police Department that my bank had received formal instructions to immediately release the seized funds… dating from January 2017. That’s more than six years ago. I went to the bank, ( August 11, 2023) the lady I found behind the counter, despite her friendly smile, informed me after checking that my account was still “blocked” and that I should contact my account manager if I wanted to find out more.”
Barrister Abeng also revealed that he was suspected of sponsoring terrorism activities in Cameroon shortly after the outbreak of the armed conflict in the Anglophone regions.
“The government of the Republic of Cameroon in 2022 contacted me to work on the bond issue. With such a profile, what could I have done to have my bank accounts frozen, blocked and seized? The answer is quite simple: I was suspected, I learnt, of terrorism and complicity in terrorism. According to the instructions sent to my bank at the beginning of 2017 by the Director of the Judicial Police on the strict instructions of the Yaoundé Military Court,” he revealed.
Surprisingly, the international lawyer was never summoned to the Police or Court and never arrested, so why freeze his funds to date?
Whether you believe me or not, I’m praying fervently for the Cameroonian judicial authorities who have branded me a terrorist and ordered my accounts to be frozen! Given
Barrister Abeng 2023
the seriousness of the charges against me (on paper), it’s a miracle that no one (even at the time) has ordered my arrest! I told my son that the Cameroonian authorities who had ordered my bank account to be frozen because I had asked for the Ohada law to be translated into English so that I could understand it better as a real working tool, are no different from the white imperialists in South Africa
Despite this treatment, the same laws Barrister struggled for to be translated are not really applicable to the letter, “In Cameroon, we are still not out of the situation that arose in 2016, simply because someone in the government thought that asking for laws to be translated into English was too much to ask! No doubt, then, that 8 years on, the same person probably still believes that it is legitimate for laws applicable in Cameroon to exist only in French. It is obvious that such “French-speaking supremacists abound and their ranks are growing by the day. Yet this destroys the legal fabric of our Nation!”
