On Niat Njifenji Marcel And The Disintegration Of Cameroon

Mr. Niat Njifenji Marcel, a civil and electricity engineer with long spates as Director General of Cameroon Electricity Corporation (SONEL) and former Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Economy and Planning was proposed, unopposed for Senate President and unanimously voted in by his selected peers.

He was not one of the shortlisted personalities for senate president by Cameroon media and rumours tabloids. Such shortlists included former PMs Simon Achidi Achu, Peter Mafany Musonge and Sultan Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya.

The Senate President is the Second personality in Cameroon and designated to replace the president of the republic for 45 days while waiting for elections to be organized in case the President died suddenly in power as it happened in Nigeria, Gabon, Ghana, Togo and might soon happen in Cameroon; or he takes over when the president is impeded by ill health.

Himself, as old as President Paul Biya, being born one year after Biya in 1934, history says Marcel worked closely with Paul from Cameroon's independence in 1960. They occupied key positions under the presidency of Ahmadou Ahidjo tinkering and wiring policy.

Niat Njifenji was manager of Cameroon Electricity Development (EDC) where he oversaw the integration of the POWERCAM producing, transporting and supplying electricity to West Cameroon (Southern Cameroons) and the one supplying electricity to la Republique du Cameroun to form the French sponsored SONEL.

Marcel is remembered as the one who dissolved POWERCAM, even though it was designed to be sustainable, durable and its continuity was guaranteed.

The plants of POWERCAM still remain standing in Yoke near Muyuka, South West Region of Cameroon. Today, when power is rationed and Cameroon witnesses many power outages and cuts, experts believe replacing only a few screws and bolts at the Yoke POWERCAM station will generate substantial amounts of electricity throughout the year.

The volume of water harnessed at Yoke is constant and its supply for turning the turbines is guaranteed throughout the year. This supply from Yoke is sufficient to light the whole South West and North West Regions (Southern Cameroons) and the excess could be sold to parts of la Republique du Cameroun.

Integration of electricity supply in Cameroon, for all purposes, meant the destruction of the potential for autonomy and independence for this part of the UN trusteeship territory. Many other establishments: Cameroon Bank, Produce Marketing Organization (PMO) suffered from the destructive mission assigned integration of establishments in Cameroon.

The PMO guaranteed the provision of farm inputs to farmers, in the form of insecticides, pesticides, fertilizers and farm subsidies. Farm to market roads were properly maintained to enable PMO trucks convey produce from hinterlands to the Victoria and Tiko Ports.

These ports were also casualties of the great integration mission of assets and resources in Cameroon. Somebody needs to convince me that Cameroon does not deliberately destroy its economy under rash schemes like the one handed to Niat Njifenji Marcel.

North West Cooperative Association (NWCA) generated FCFA 3,900,750,000 from Arabica coffee alone in the 1978/1979 financial year. Farmers were able to educate their children and address most of their needs. Under integration, they were advised to cut down all coffee plants in the North West and South West and plant food crops, because cash crops were not selling well on the international market.

Mbengwi Central Cooperative Union (MBECCU), for example, drew net profits of FCFA 350,000,000 in the 1978/1979 financial year. 10 years later in 1988, Cameroon policymakers in Yaounde advised that cocoa and coffee should be cleared to make way for food that can be consumed in Cameroon. It is interesting to note that the coffee trees in la Republique du Cameroun remain standing till date.

What wisdom, then, dictated to la Republique du Cameroun to advise West Cameroonians to destroy their means of subsistence? Could it be correct to surmise that it was just a ploy to bring that part of Cameroon to its knees, and justify the claims of England that independence for Southern Cameroons was too expensive and unsustainable?

Most Cameroonians have concluded that the senate will be a moribund house of old cankerous jesters, who will snore through sessions, waking just to clap along the disturbing claps from the others.

The senators do not enjoy any legitimacy and cannot pretend to have a mandate from Cameroonians. Of the 100 senators, 30 are appointed by President Paul Biya. The rest 70 have been selected from the CPDM to fill space in senate.

Reports are rife of the wanton election irregularities, including sequestration of voters, and outright bribery of councilors and parliamentarians in the North West Region. The North West Region is the fief of the opposition SDF party of Ni John Fru Ndi. He was one of the candidates from Mezam Division where Hon Simon Achidi Achu doled out millions to councilors to vote for the CPDM.

Bizarrely, Fru Ndi did not challenge the victory of the CPDM in the Supreme Court of Cameroon. In an earlier article, I had described the CPDM as the Cameroon Demolition Movement and the SDF as the Social Disaster Front. I stand vindicated today, as we have seen a clear vetting of Biya's choice for senate. Senate in Cameroon is 100 percent CPDM.

There is no single senator in the Cameroon Senate mandated by Cameroonians. The mandate of the councilors and parliamentarians had expired and had to be renewed before any election of senators. President Paul Biya chose to put the cart before the horse, thus slowing down the Advanced Democracy he trumpets to have brought to Cameroon.

Can any president be more spiteful of his citizens than Paul Biya of Cameroon?

Niat Marcel Njifenji is not even one of the senators who was claimed to have been elected among the 70 selected. Niat is one of the 30 appointed senators that Biya sent to senate. To have selected Niat to be Senate President tells us abundantly that Biya does not care for Cameroonians and their choices, and acts like a despot.

Thank God we will soon start registering deaths among these dead but living senators in the days ahead.

The first senate in Cameroon might be a pleasant blessing in disguise. Imagine that 80 percent of the senators are above 65 years. It foretells that in the next five years they are expected to be reelected. They would have reached the biblical age of 70 and should return to their creator, for the virtuous ones.

Niat's appointment as Senate president suggests that they might be some disintegration in the offing. After 53 years of experimenting with integration, we of the Anglophone culture have concluded that the experiment is flawed and is unworkable. We are frowning at the dissolution of Southern Cameroons establishments, institutions and standards. We believe that it is criminal of la Republique du Cameroun to trade off 730 square kilometers of our over 90,000 sq kilometers of land to the Herakles Farms, at no profit to Southern Cameroons.

It is also criminal that no single meter of tarred road exists in the Ndian Division which supplies all the crude oil mined in Cameroon. We watched powerless as Cameroon civil administrators trained in Yaounde conspire to grab lands even in the Government Residential Areas (GRAs) which housed the cream of Southern Cameroon administrators. It is also disheartening that indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities are dispossessed of their means of livelihood.

If Niat Marcel Njifenji has realized that his integration was flawed, then he needs to disintegrate. Disintegration does not mean divorcing his wife from Fontem in the South West Region of Southern Cameroons. The fact that he is intimately linked to this part of the country should have inspired him to strive to understand the worries, anxieties and aspirations of Anglophone Cameroons. We cannot continue to sustain a dysfunctional system imposed on us by la Republique du Cameroun.

Fon Christopher Achobang
Department of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
University of Buea
P.O. Box 63 Buea

(Senior Translator),
English-French-English
Expertise; International Business Translation; Literary Translation,
Medical Translation; Legal Translation, Editing; Proofreading; Translation lecturer.

(Senior Reporter, Social Commentator, Human rights activist)
The Cameroons

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