At 77, he was an honorary member of the Central Committee of the CPDM.
The ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM has lost one of its longstanding members, elder statesman Hon. Samuel Ngeh Tamfu, who passed on at the Yaounde General Hospital on Wednesday March 28, 2012. The honorary member of the CPDM Central Committee, fondly referred to as ‘Pa Tamfu’, died at the age of 77 after a protracted illness, family sources said.
The venerated politician who was born in 1935 in Tamba, Taku village in Ndu Subdivision, Donga Mantung Division of the North West Region, joined politics in 1959 and entered Parliament. He remained in the party as representative of Nkambe Constituency till 1965 when he was appointed Secretary of State for Economy and Planning in Premier Augustine Ngom Jua’s government.
In 1968, he bounced back to Parliament, this time on the ticket of the Cameroon National Union, CNU party. The ‘selfless politician’ as he was fondly referred to in 1968, was again made Secretary of State in the Prime Minister’s office for Public Works, in Premier Muna’s government but was dropped in 1970. He returned to Parliament in 1988 and stayed till 1996 during which he was Vice President of the CPDM Parliamentary Group.
Hon. Tamfu was a member of the Central Committee of the CPDM and also of the Political Bureau. Until the September 2011 CPDM third ordinary congress in Yaounde, he was the only CPDM Political Bureau member from the North West Region. After the congress, he was made honorary member of the Central Committee. He also occupied the position of Section President of the CPDM for Donga Mantung for many years.
As family members, friends and CPDM party members mourn him, credit must be given to a man who stood resolutely by the ruling party in the tumultuous years of the introduction of multi-party democracy in the country in the early nineties.
Hon. Tamfu was also a relentless champion of the creation of a Far North West Region; a dream he did not achieve before his death. The funeral programme is yet to be released.
