No Negotiation with the Catholic Criminals

Dear Barrister Fon Robert Nsoh,
From my hideout, I heard over the Cameroon Radio Television that you were leading the Mbororo in negotiations for land sharing with the Catholic Archbishop of Bamenda. I wish to remind you that there can be no negotiations with a criminal who has demolished your clients' homes and livelihoods. What you should be doing now is to get the higher courts of the land to punish Cornelius Fontem Esua for declaring that he was not taking orders from the court. Your brief was to get the courts to cancel the temporary land concession granted to the CATUC in error. Barrister Sama who defended the Mbororo in the Court of First Instance Bamenda did a formidable job to get the lower courts to refer the matter to the Administrative Court. I do not want to accuse you of a poor performance because you suddenly cowered in front of the mountain of money and retainer the CATUC proposed to you.

I believe the issue at hand is that the temporary land concession granted to the Catholic University of Cameroon (CATUC), represented by His Grace? Cornelius Fontem Esua was granted in error and must be reversed. Do not hand out Mbororo land to this apartheid archbishop who worships money and land.

The Administrative Court of the North West Region admitted the petition to quash the ultra vires acts and civil matter acts made without authority. Ultra vires acts within the meaning of the Administrative Court are Acts that are invalid for the following reasons:-

- They are bad in form
- They are made without jurisdiction
- They infringe legal provision or regulation (Land Tenure Laws)

- They constitute an abuse of authority
We do not need a doctorate of law philosophy to understand that the decision of the Minister of Land, Surveys and State Property was an ultra vires act infringing on the legal provisions pursuant to the Land Tenure Laws, and that this happened because the Chairman of the Lands Consultative Board abused his authority by disregarding the prefectural order of 2009 from the SDO of Mezam Division.

As the petition of the chief of the Mbororo is admissible in the Administrative Court, you should now seek legal aid to boost your defense team with those qualified in facing the decadent and epileptic administrators in Cameroon. They seem to have been thrown into a feat by the coma grip of corruption that has taken most Cameroonians hostage.

You should humbly admit that you are not competent negotiating with corporate criminals like the archbishop of Bamenda and the corrupt administrators of Cameroon who have sold their souls for 30 pieces of silver. You do not have the clout, like most Cameroonian lawyers to resist the tempting pieces of silver from the Judas Eschariot that the Archbishop of Bamenda has become.

One of your learned colleagues stated after losing a simple case that he may lose a case but not his profession. The undertone in this confession is that he was ready to go by the highest bidder. The highest bidder in this Mbororo-Catholic land debacle is the Archbishop who has spent scores of millions bribing the authorities to hearken to his call.

Cornelius Fontem Esua claims to have forced some of the 300 Mbororo to receive the derisory amount of 23 million FCFA as compensation for their houses and crops. He further submits that he paid 13 million into the state coffers as land revenue. He has failed to confess the amounts paid as motivation to the decadent administrators, judges and police to support his claims. These are the only receipted amounts of money spent by the Archbishop. He has spent a lot more bribing administrators and land and survey collaborators. The chief of Ndzah who sold the Bambili land (he received 72 million claiming to be the landlord) is interestingly richer today thanks to the Archbishop. These amounts paid by the archbishop have pushed him into further recklessness and imprudence.

The targeting of the Mbororo ethnic minority and indigenous group for displacement is a crime against humanity. That the courts of Bamenda and the North West Region of Cameroon failed to stop the Archbishop of Bamenda from demolishing Mbororo houses is proof that Cornelius Fontem Esua has elevated the ecclesiastical province of Bamenda into a state. That the administration of Mezam Division represented by the Senior Divisional Officer (S.D.O) Felix Nguele Nguele declared that the conflict between this Muslim group and the Christian Roman Catholic Church is a private matter, betrays the administrator as bias and interested, and would not negotiate fairly. And that the Mbororo were sent back to live on part of the land means the CATUC had no business demolishing their homes.

Negotiations for such issues should be done with the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of the community. The Archbishop and the administration have refused to consult the Mbororo for their consent. They have instead treated the Mbororo as foreigners who do not belong in Cameroon and should not be protected by Cameroonian laws.

The Mbororo are pastoralist and nomadic in general. The particular Mbororo of Wumse-Ndzah have been settled on their land before the hunting gathering Banja people joined them. That the Banja chief should believe that he is the landlord is unfounded in history. This matter might soon take a different twist with the Bambili chief stepping in to stop the trespass. Chief Mamada acquired the present land from the Bambili by handing him cattle in exchange. The Banja should never present themselves as landlords because there is a clear boundary between the Ndzah people and the Mamada family, which is a Mbororo community. This boundary was set in 1933 by Ordinance 49.

Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, the demolition of Mbororo houses and their displacement sadly reminds us that mankind is still very savage and would readily apply his barbarity on fellowman. Like in Rwanda where the prefets (S.D.O) and the priests (archbishop) were the people who commandeered the bulldozing of the Tutsi, here in Cameroon it is also the S.D.O of Mezam and the Roman Catholic archbishop who targeted the Mbororo and demolished their houses.

It is now clear that if the Archbishop and the S.D.O had their way, they would readily kill all the Mbororo than negotiate. Tell me honestly what you Barrister Fon Robert Nsoh intend to get from these crooked corporate criminals. Your clients were chased with teargas in front the Cathedral after you marched them there against my advice.

I will need you to address three main issues that are always addressed when a huge development project is coming. The CATUC has to do an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) even before bulldozing on an ecologically fragile area like Wumse-Ndzah. Was this done? If this was done it would have been realized that a huge student community up the Mamada hill will seriously strain water supply to Nkwen, and parts of Bambui. Even bulldozing huge chunks of land on the hill will expose it to serious erosion threatening those who have settled in the valleys below.

How does the CATUC intend to let the Mbororo share in the development coming to their land? There is no Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the CATUC and the Mbororo. It means that it never crossed the archbishop's mind to consider the Mbororo as stakeholders of the development on their land. With his history of land grabbing, the Archbishop clearly states in his quit notice that there would be no further compensation.

Remember that those who collected money did not know why and they collected it under duress. Community leaders were tortured. D.O Walters Tarkang confessed that he ordered the arrest and torture of the Mbororo chief for order to prevail in his administrative unit. You were present when he made this confession on 16 April 2013 at the S.D.O's office in Bamenda. If he tortured the Mbororo chief (there is a medical certificate in evidence) it proves that the free consent of the Mbororo was not sought. The Mbororo were treated like property of the Banja. They were targeted for collective displacement. This is a precursor of genocide.

Remember how Hitler moved Jews to Auschwitz and their subsequent genocide.

The proposed resettlement site for the Mbororo is a conflict zone as it is Bambili land where the Bambili people have land titles. You accompanied me to the proposed resettlement site when the UN Independent Expert for Minority issues visited the disputed land in September 2013. You saw the land titles of the victims of the demolished houses on the Bambili land.

It is clear that, not wishing to kill all the Mbororo today, the S.D.O and the Archbishop are forcefully removing them from their land and concentrating them on the Bambili land, so that the Bambili can come tomorrow and wipe out the Mbororo. This is a crime against humanity.

Since most of you learned Cameroonian lawyers are ignorant of crimes against humanity, I wish to list them for your edification.

Crimes against humanity correspond to Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Crime against humanity means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

(a) Murder, (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement;

(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;

(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;

(f) Torture
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

(i) Enforced disappearance of persons
(j) The Crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

I wish to emphasize the crimes committed against the Mbororo people in the words of the Rome Statutes.

The Mbororo were targeted by the Elachu, Baforchu II or the Ndzah people simply because they are pastoralists who came to these parts from very far (Ngaoundere). The Ndzah people see the Mbororo like strangers and had been planning under the current Ndzah chief to forcefully remove them from their land. The Mbororo of Mamada hill acquired their land by giving 10 bulls to the Chief of Bambili over a century ago. The real landlord of the Mbororo land is the Bambili group and not the Ndzah. The chief of Ndzah took advantage of the ill-health of the late Fon Awemo II of Bambili to execute his long-hatched plan dispossess the Mbororo of their land and wipe them out of existence. Guilty of this betrayal and trespass the Ndzah chieftain did not attend the enthronement of Fon Tamukum II of Bambili on 7 February 2014.

According to the Rome Statutes the demolition of Mbororo houses and their farms are acts to intentionally inflict on them conditions of life inter alia; the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of the population.

Demolishing Mbororo houses and proposing to forcefully remove them from their hill is 'deportation or forcible transfer of population'. This is the displacement of the Mbororo by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area where they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.

'Torture' has been used against the Mbororo to intentionally inflict severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon them. Their leadership was physically assaulted leading to 21 days incapacity just to make sure they accepted the money from the Archbishop. The people torturing were the prefet and sous prefet who were supposed to protect them.

'Persecution' of the Mbororo has taken the form of denying them the same right to property and quality of life as is guaranteed by both Cameroonian laws and international laws. This is simply because they are Mbororo believed to be foreign in some parts of Cameroon. Nowhere in Cameroon does development come without the consent of the beneficiary population. Only the Bagyeli and Baka pigmy and the pastoralist Mbororo are treated like that.

'The crime of apartheid' in this case will mean inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to earlier committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

It is unthinkable that 20 years after the Rwandan genocide administrators and priests in Cameroon are behaving exactly in the same way leading to the sad calculated, planned and executed mass killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. While the world commemorates these sad events, some individuals with moral and executive authority choose to do the same repugnant and abhorrent things that remind us of the Rwandan genocide.

That the Prefet of Mezam told me on phone that the problem in Wumse-Ndzah was a private matter between the Mbororo and Catholics, and he went ahead to support the archbishop in demolishing Mbororo homes and farms is ethnic targeting. That magistrate Ngwene Georges James decided to tie the hands of justice by advising the archbishop to disregard judicial decisions of the court not to demolish Mbororo land is persecution.

How could Magistrate Ngwene tell the Mbororo who were being released from detention that even if the matter went to the Supreme Court, the Catholics must own the land? There is serious conflict of interest here. Ngwene is State Counsel for Mezam meaning he represents the Laws of Cameroon. Choosing to advise a private institution to disregard court edicts in the guise of these acts not being properly drafted is sheer treason against the judiciary. It also beats my imagination that you went along these trite arguments, instead justifying the option for land sharing as such becoming an apologist for the archbishop and his cohorts.

Such wanton bias must result from some special interest. Magistrate Ngwene Georges James is a communicant of the Catholic Church. Ngwene could have elected to play the religious conflict between the Mbororo (Muslim) and the Catholics (Christian).

This type of motivated bias by the Christians against the Muslims would always be construed by Muslims as an attack of Muslims by Christians. There is now a cold war going on between these groups. The kidnapping of Catholic priests, even though by ransom-seeking criminals without any religious undertones, could now be justified as retaliation for the demolition of Muslim homes and place of worship.

Demolition of Mbororo houses and farms in Wumse-Ndzah sets a very bad precedence in an area where Mbororo have always felt threatened. This Mbororo community of Wumse-Ndzah has tried to live lawfully since 1904. Their present chief is married to a Christian, a taboo to Muslims. These Mbororo in Wumse-Ndzah could be said to have integrated mainstream life. The story is not same from other communities in the North West where they are seen to be living on the fringes of society.

Some villages in the North West present cases of Mbororo who steal and destroy the property of their more settled semi-bantu neighbors. These Mbororo are said to destroy crops belonging to farmers sparking farmers-grazers problems leading to bloodshed.

Ten farmers in Njah-Etu village showed me wounds on their heads inflicted by the pastoralist Mbororo who trespass destroying foodstuff and farm houses. The targeting and demolition of Mbororo houses in Wumse-Ndzah would embolden those opposed to Mbororo settlement on their land. These people would point to the Mbororo as criminals and target them for expulsion from all over the North West Region.

In these places where the Mbororo have identified themselves as the bad boys who corrupt the prefets to cover their crimes, the days after the demolition of houses in Wumse-Ndzah would be uncertain.

All these things are happening because law enforcers have metamorphosed into lawbreakers. Lawyers, magistrates, police, gendarmes and prefets listen only to money. The fattest envelop sways their decisions and judgments.

For the learned Barrister Fon Robert and Co representing the poor Mbororo of Wumse-Ndzah, the temptation to trade legal procedure for money from lawbreakers (Archbishop, prefet, sousprefet, and magistrate) is high.

Today, the lawyer has been swayed to talk on CRTV about the issue being that the Catholic University of Cameroon has taken more land than it was granted by the temporary land concession.

I want the learned counsel to refocus the case. The issue here is the erroneous allocation of 46 hectares to the CATUC on Mbororo land which is land in Category One contrary to the Land Tenure Laws of Cameroon and the Prefectural order of 2009 ordering the sousprefet of Bamenda III to identify land in Category Two and demarcate it for CATUC. I believe the matter was admitted in the Administrative Court of the North West Region to resolve these administrative errors.

The issue is not in court for the Mbororo to share their land with the CATUC but to stop the Archbishop from trespassing on Mbororo land with the complicity of some administrators and judges. The case is even compounded by the Archbishop and some administrators disregarding the stay of execution from the administrative Court and demolishing Mbororo houses, leaving them homeless with no food.

Learned Barrister Fon Robert Nsoh must refocus his arguments so that he is not seen to have been blinded by a fat envelope from the enemies (archbishop, administrators, State Counsel Mezam and the Banja people) of his clients. His performance so far has been wanting and portrays him as a mediocre lawyer or a lawyer who has been blinded by corruption.

Any decisions emerging from this new romance between Barrister Fon Robert and the Catholics on the one hand and the corrupt administrators on the other hand would be null and void, not binding on any Mbororo.

I will be reacting to the statement from the Director of Communication of the Archbishop, your new client, in the hours ahead. Walk straight so that nobody can ride your back.

Fon Christopher Achobang
Social Commentator, Human rights activist
The Cameroons