OPINION Queen’s Death: What benefits do Cameroonians have as members of the Commonwealth?

By Hans Ngala

The Queen will be laid to rest today. Since the announcement of her death last week, all we have seen is a flurry of activity. South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa first flew to the US to meet with Civil Rights leaders and then met business executives as he tried to encourage them to invest more in his country.
He will immediately fly back home after the Queen’s funeral, to deal with an acute electricity problem by the country’s national grid supplier, Eskom.
Nigeria’s Mohammadu Buhari is also heading to the US and instead delegating the country’s Vice President to attend the Queen’s funeral. Nigerian publication Premium Times wondered why the country’s two top officials had to simultaeneously leave Nigeria.
Cameroon’s Paul Biya delegated Prime Minister, Dion Ngute to represent Cameroon at the funeral in Westminster Abbey.
The trip to London will cost the citizens of Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda hundreds of taxpayers’ money. But on top of that, leaders attending the funeral have been told to fly to Heathrow Airport on commercial flights to avoid noise and crowding at Heathrow.
World leaders have also been asked not to being their private cars to Westminster but to group on buses for both security and traffic ease purposes.

So how does the Commonwealth benefit Cameroonians?
It is a fair question to ask because the stringent rules that Britain still applies even to former colonies like Cameroon, makes one to wonder of what use it is for Cameroon to maintain such close ties with the United Kingdom.
Besides the fact that Queen Elizabeth was understandably bound by her office not to make political comments, she still offered an apology to the Maori people of NewZealand in 1995 for the crimes committed against these people in the name of her ancestor, Queen Victoria.
In fact, the seaside town of Limbe in Cameroon was once named Victoria but Cameroonians understood the need to shake off the bonds of colonialism and hence, renamed the town.
But English-speaking Cameroonians from the former British Southern Cameroons, have held dear to the values and cultures they inherited from the Brits: we still write the General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary and Advanced Levels; we practice English Common Law in this part of the country and up until the 1960s, cars in this part of Cameroon were driven on the right!
This loyalty to British norms has hardly ever been reciprocated and yet, Cameroon’s unity is even dangling on the fence as a result of divisions caused by Britain when one of their own ie Lancelot Oliphant and the Frenchman George Picot simply sat down with a ruler and partitioned Cameroon. The exercise which never sought the opinions of Cameroonians on the matter, largely constructed the map of Cameroon as we know it today.
However, one begins to wonder why the Queen who is Britain’s ceremonial head (and hence has a lot of influence on the elected British Prime Ministers), found it hard to utter a word when war broke out in their former territory of Southern Cameroon.
There is no benefit to speaking English for Anglophone Cameroonians be it in Cameroon or in the UK. In Cameroon, Anglophones have been ‘forced’ by the circumstances they find themselves in, to speak a hybrid language of French-English. Francophone Cameroonians treat English like a ‘partois’ – or dialect and their disdain for the Queen’s language is often very clear in their body language when they tell off Anglophones in public offices.
Anglophone Cameroonians are still required to sit for and pass exams such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and are expected to score at least 70 percent before they can apply for a visa to the United Kingdom. Never mind that the IELTS costs FCFA 180,000 and if a candidate fails to achieve the 70 percent pass mark, he or she still has to pay that same amount and repeat the exam. This is already too much money for the average Cameroonian and this is a ridiculous requirement seeing that Anglophone Cameroonians along with Nigerians, Ghanaians, South Africans and Kenyans start all their education from elementary school all the way to university in English and the GCE O and A Levels are in English!
The very fact that a visa is required from countries that are Commonwealth member states is very ridiculous to begin with. At the very least, the visa requirements for English-speaking Cameroonians should be made easier by the UK Foreign Department.
How do we explain the fact that people from Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Chile or Costa Rica and El Salvador can enter the UK without a visa but English-speaking Cameroonians need a visa?
At the height of the Anglophone Crisis, a British gas company signed deals with the Cameroon government at a time when observers were expecting the UK to rather step in to mediate or at least facilitate talks between separatists and the government of Cameroon.
The Queen has died without ever commenting on the situation in the Anglophone regions and without ever offering an apology for the inhumane treatment of Southern Cameroonians who were colonized at a time when she was already queen.
We must rethink our relationship with the UK and find ways in which that relationship would be mutually beneficial to both parties.
For now, we are still waiting for an apology from the UK and perhaps, we should stop glorifying them and sanitizing history the way we have been taught in schools.