By Hans Ngala
When the Anglophone Crisis began in 2016 as street protests by lawyers, the lawyers were manhandled by police and beaten. Teachers who had planned a protest saw how lawyers were maltreated and chose to do sit-in strikes instead. The Ghost Town phenomenon which began in the 1990s following John Fru Ndi’s creation of the SDF Party – soon followed again. Ghost Towns became common from December 2016 and thousands of Ghost Towns have since followed in the NW and SW regions.
The Biya regime and its collaborators such as governors and CPDM mayors were very quick to label the Ghost Towns as “unpatriotic” or “anti-republican”. But today’s announcement of a nationwide Ghost Town by Issa Tchiroma – a former cabinet minister in Biya’s government who once vehemently opposed Ghost Towns – seems to be confirmation of the fact that Ghost Towns are indeed effective. While Tchiroma has since decamped from the Biya government, he seems to understand the effectiveness and strategy behind Ghost Towns: Force the other party to make concessions.
When Bamenda and Buea were experiencing lock downs, the rest of the country couldn’t care less. The lock downs were met with indifference by some and with scorn by others who repudiated them, blaming those who “sit in Europe and America” and call for others to “suffer”. What will become of this line of reasoning as the caller of this Mother of all Ghost Towns is IN the country himself and will be affected by the Ghost Town just as much?
It is safe to say that Ghost Towns in the NW and SW have been very effective and hurt the government, even if they pretend otherwise. No wonder they always threaten shop owners with sanctions for respecting Ghost Towns. No wonder Biya’s regime has been going from one borrowing spree to another as the Ghost Towns have been biting deep. It remains to be seen if his regime will be able to withstand a monumental Ghost Town on a national scale like the kind Tchiroma is calling for. It seems that the strategy Tchiroma saw in the NW, SW is so strategically effective that he wants to do same on the other side of the Moungo River. In this sense, history seems to prove that this approach was hurting the regime.
