Breaking Political Ice

The meeting between President Paul Biya and the foremost opposition leader, John Fru Ndi last Friday December 10 in Bamenda was definitely a landmark event in the process of political denouement in the country. Let us compare this meeting with an event some 25 years ago. On November 10, 1887, a 58-year old English explorer arrived at Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganyika. As the local population welcomed him heartily, another white man who had arrived in the village earlier, came out of a hut. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”, was the first remark the 30-year-old journalist, John Rowland alias Stanley made upon seeing the explorer. Stanley had not seen a white man for over five years as he explored the African interior.

This anecdote fits into Friday’s meeting. In the same way as race united the two explorers, the ambition to serve can be said to have underlined the decision of the two political foes of yore to bury the hatchet. Stanely had not met a man of his own colour in five previous years. And when they met, a new period of teamwork gave their entire objective of exploring the African hinterland new and greater impetus.

We all know in what circumstances the Social Democratic Front was launched in Bamenda 20 years ago. Symptomatically, it is in this same Bamenda that the Cameroon People’s Democratic Party had been born five years earlier. The occupation of the political ground by the SDF in what the CPDM considered its birthplace and, consequently its stronghold, could not go down easily with the powers that be in Yaounde. For the past 20 years, therefore, the Yaounde political leadership incarnated by President Paul Biya and Mr John Fru Ndi have stared at each other like a stuck pig.

Although the CPDM has remained in power virtually unperturbed by even the most aggressive manifestation of SDF militancy, one cannot ignore the fact that the SDF has been one very pester in the CPDM attempt to rule unflustered.

The SDF started off with crushing influence in the North West Region and the results of the 1992 Presidential election gave the party an illusion that it had a national destiny. But since then, the party’s fortunes have only been waning in the region with each passing election. The party remained radically keen on its ideological opposition to the Biya government and its policies; ignoring the huge toll this heady position took on the developmental ambitions on a region as rich as the North West. Even in this situation of hostility, the government in Yaounde did not quite abandon its republican duty of ensuring that Cameroonians all have equal access to opportunities.

Like Livingstone and Stanley mentioned above and who shared a common belonging by being whites in a vast country of blacks, President Biya and John Fru Ndi are brothers of the same fatherland and by their act of last Friday, broke the political ice which now enables them to talk freely with each other. All the pernicious intentions they had about each other, seem to have gone with this meeting. As Mr Fru Ndi himself declared after the 45-minute meeting with the President of the Republic, the stalemate has been broken. This means wide avenues have been opened to let the voice of the people of the North West to be heard, rather than confining them to a corner and treating them as good-for-nothing or heady opposition people hardly conversant with political strategies that can, while keeping their specific political colour, help jumpstart the veritable development of the North West Region. Opposition can never be a position of principle. It is possible to agree on somethings and disagree over others. By receiving Mr Fru Ndi, the President of the Republic was, in no way, seeking to absorb the SDF, nor to cage it. On the contrary, the act was to illustrate that Cameroon’s democratic process is already reaching levels that encourage the promotion of market places of ideas from within which the people can select objectively.

If the tempo of last week’s political activities in Bamenda is kept afloat, then Cameroon could be poised for a new period of civilised politicking.

Nkendem FORBINAKE