OPINION: ‘No Mr. Tchiroma, Anglophones Refuse to be Part of Your Political Gimmicks’

By Hans Ngala

Former government minister, Issa Tchiroma has ruffled some feathers with his dramatic exit from President Paul Biya’s government. Tchiroma left the country in speculative mood as to whether he had indeed resigned until he penned a lengthy letter, detailing his reasons for severing ties with Biya’s regime – which he had been part of, for decades.
Highlights of Tchiroma’s letter included his sudden acknowledgement of Anglophone grievances which he staunchly refuted when he was a sitting minister. The 75-year-old now says Anglophone concerns are legitimate.
The same has been said by Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement – also a breakaway opposition leader from the ruling CPDM. Kamto is said to have been one of the brains behind drafting the 2008 consitutional amendment that increased Biya’s term of office to the current 7 years. While Anglophone concerns were always present in 2008, they were not as pronounced as they became in 2016.
Both Kamto and Tchiroma have declared their intentions to seek to oust Biya by the ballot in October and both men have made Anglophone concerns, key aspects of their campaign messaging.
However, it is very clear that Anglophones are being used as tools of political expedience. If anything has taught us Anglophones, any lesson in this country, it is that we shed our blood, fight for things and then we are dumped while government takes credit for it.
Take the General Certificate of Education (GCE) Board for example: In the 1990s, Anglophone students at the University of Yaounde and across the country, fought hard as they resisted systemic attempts by the Biya regime to co-opt them into a Francophone system. The GCE Board was supposed to be an independent body catering to Anglophone students from the North West and South West Provinces. But no sooner had the GCE Board been created than the government started meddling with it and today has taken complete control of it.
As the civil conflict in the NW and SW enters its eighth year this October, Anglophones are acutely aware of the silence, the mockery and sometimes outlandish things said to them by some from both within the Anglophone community itself (mainly in cahoots with the regime) such as Paul Atanga Nji who vehemently refused that an Anglophone problem exists in Cameroon. In a 2017 broadcast on CRTV, he categorically stated: “I’m saying it today, I will say it tomorrow; there is no Anglophone Problem in Cameroon…” Atanga Nji said with an arrogance that is perhaps only rivalled by Tchiroma’s.
So while Tchiroma’s exit from Biya’s government is being hailed as “heroic” in some quarters, Anglophones are not impressed. Cameroonian commentator, Ekinneh Agbaw Ebai in a recent column, headlined ‘The Judas of Yaoundé: Issa Tchiroma Seeks Political Redemption Without Repentance’, argues that “As Cameroon nears a historic presidential election, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, a man whose career has been steeped in the noxious stew of breathtaking hypocrisy and betrayal, has now emerged, astonishingly, as a self-proclaimed savior of Cameroon”. Agbaw-Ebai goes on to state that “Tchiroma, for decades, was Biya’s most shameless apologist, the regime’s voice-box and ideological attack dog, who now seeks to unshackle himself from the very chains he spent years tightening around the Cameroonian people. Tchiroma did not merely serve the despotic Biya regime. He defended it with unmatched zeal, rationalizing repression and denying atrocities with unflinching composure. He wasn’t merely complicit; he was instrumental. He did not seek truth; he spun brazen lies. He did not serve the people; he served power. Now, with Biya’s dynasty on life support – its 93-year-old patriarch facing creeping senility, hidden behind curtains of frailty, health comorbidities, and palace intrigues – Tchiroma seeks to disown the house he helped burn, by rebranding himself before the regime’s final collapse”.
To add to Agbaw-Ebai’s critique, I would say ‘No Mr. Tchiroma, Anglophones refuse to be part of Your political gimmicks’. It is clear that a man as dishonest as Tchiroma has proven himself to be, cannot be trusted to suddenly be the one that will advance their rights. It would be political suicide for Anglophones to trust a man like Tchiroma. He sounds like his hands were bound. He was communications minister who could have stood up for the truth during his tenure and acknowledged that Anglophones were indeed marginalized but he spun lies and denied facts – some of which took the BBC’s investigative team, thorough investigations for him to later accept that shootings of women with babies strapped to their backs, was indeed in Cameroon or that it was in fact Cameroonian soldiers who were seen in a widely circulated video, burning Kwa Kwa village in the South West Region in the early years of the current phase of the Anglophone Crisis.
Anglophones have bled and continue to bleed, they have been imprisoned and many continue to be imprisoned just for speaking out and having gone through all this, we refuse to be political pawns for the likes of Tchiroma to use – and discard when they no longer need us.
For Tchiroma to have denied that Anglophones are marginalized, is to deny the power dynamics that favour Francophones who hold public office like him. Imagine how the Biya regime would have treated an Anglophone minister who dared to condemn Biya and admit that there is in fact an Anglophone Problem which is a systemic issue perpetrated by Biya’s government? The scenario is unimaginable because such an Anglophone minister would be swiftly thrown in jail and quickly forgotten about. Prof. Ngolle Ngolle, a well-known praise-singer of the regime has never admitted that Biya’s government is at fault, neither did Philemon Yang nor Paul Atanga Nji and these are basic issues of morality, not even political ones. Yet, none of these people who are in cahoots with the regime have been able to do it – until when it comes time for them to selfishly seek power. Then they suddenly know the “truth” and want to side with Anglophones. Such people are political chameleons who should not be trusted, especially those like Tchiroma.