29 YEARS: HAYATOU HUMILIATED IN CAF ELECTIONS.

ISSA HAYATOU-Former CAF President

It is often said, it is advisable to leave the stage while the applause is loudest, but not when you are called Hayatou and hails from Cameroon. African Football on Thursday March 16, 2017 landed a new leader with the election of the 57 year old Madagascar's Ahmed Ahmad  who has ousted long serving  Issa Hayatou  during an elections held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. Ahmad garnered a total of 34 votes against Hayatou's 20 votes ending an era that lasted for close to three decade. The 70 year old Cameroonian born Hayatou has ruled African football since 1988 (29 uninterrupted years) and was going for an eighth term in office.

Ahmad Ahmad: Celebrating his victory with members of the Zimbabwe FA

Issa Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) for an era spanning 29 years and a senior administrator at FIFA throughout its years of corruption scandals, has finally been deposed. Hayatou, a former teacher and sports minister from the Hayatous’ dynasty in Cameroon was first elected as the CAF president in 1988 and became a member of the FIFA executive committee two years later.

Ahmad will replace him on FIFA’s governing council. So this election signals the departure of another old face from world football’s governing body executive committee. One which overlapped with the 17-year presidency of Sepp Blatter. This marks a new page in football governance in Africa and the world. The corrupt Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini were all banned from any footballing activity and Hayatou’s departure brings a logical end to Blatter and his cronies.

Some people have been quick to identify G. Infantino (FIFA President) as the main man who masterminded the humiliation of Hayatou, given that Hayatou did not support his campaign to the helm of FIFA. Others think that, people just needed change and Hayatou wasn’t that person to revitalise African football. Be it the former or later, it was obvious that, world football needed a new breathe of air.

Cameroon Reacts;

The response from Hayatou’s humiliation from CAF was received with mixed feelings in Cameroon. As of now, no official statement has been made by the Ministry or Fecafoot. But, most football pundits were quick to say “at long last” he’s gone. While his supporters are rather quick to point out his 3 major achievements in African football amongst which include.

1.  Increase in world cup places from 2 to 5;
2. AFCON from 8 team to 16;
3. The financial stability of CAF;

Nonetheless, they have also complained that, Hayatou did not received the required support from the regime as necessary. Thus there were no diplomatic campagins in his favour. Nonetheless, Hayatou was either so naïve or too dictatorial not to have seen his defeat coming. It was very evident that, most FA presidents were becoming exasperated with Hayatou and needed a new blood in the management of African football. Hayatou was a leader who during his reign saw so many changes in African football. Within this changes, he did little or nothing extraordinary to have them. Most of the changes were a function of time and some. Even North Korea with his maligned leader has overseen some changes in the country. We expected the Confederation of African Football to expand and change in various domains. Here are some of the failure of Hayatou.

1. Africa remains a net exporters of footballers to other regions of the world. If you meet any African youth who plays football and ask him about his dream, he will tell you Europe;
2. Africa is still importing at almost 95% football managers. During the just ended AFCON, ONLY 2 national sides had an African as the head coach. Today, Cote d’Ivoire have just appointed Marc Wilmorts as its new coach. That is not progress;
3. If we compare CAF and the AFC in the last 29 years, there is a worrying disparity. The game in Asia has improved, Clubs can import players and use domestic trainers, the go to the world cup and don’t end up having 8-0 and 0 points at the group stage. Meanwhile, Africa is the complete opposite;
4. Since Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002 and Ghana in 2010 that reached the Quarter Finals of the world cup, no other African team has gone beyond that (Semis);
5. He didn’t not prepare his departure. In most international organisations, people prepare their successors. His departure has left Cameroon sterile in the league of African football management.

My Conclusions.

Don’t hold on to a Public Office for too long: One great lesson we can learn from Issa Hayatou’s humiliation is not to hold on for too long a public office. Public office is not a lifelong appointment, it’s for a meaningful period of time. Many of the African public office holders who break this rule often end up being booed, ridiculed and humiliated out of office. How honourable would it have been had Mobutu Sesesoko, YahYah Jahmeh, Samuel Doe, Idi Amin, and Sepp Blatter handed over power early enough before the governed got tired of them and were shamed out of the office. I hope current FIFA’s president, Ahmad Ahmad, Robert Mugabe, Paul Biya, Denis Sassou Ngessou, Obiang Nguema, Dos Santos, Idriss Deby, Kabila etc will learn a lesson or two. And for Cameroonians, Don’t Just Wish for Change, Go for It: Ahmad’s wished to see African football change and he went for it and got it. He didn’t just say it but he hunt for it until he achieved it.

A nation divided: tensions mount in Cameroon as English speakers marginalised by Francophone majority 

Cameroon's capital city Yaoundé

18 March 2017 • 3:25pm

To be born an English speaker in a world where the language remains the lingua franca of trade and diplomacy is normally to draw first prize in the linguistic lottery of life.

But in one corner of Africa, having English as a mother tongue has proved a curse thanks to a colonial anomaly that left a seething Anglophone underclass in a slither of overwhelmingly French-speaking Cameroon.

For the past four months, the two English-speaking regions of western Cameroon have risen up against a perceived decades-long assault by the Francophone elite on their language and British traditions, staging a campaign of general strikes, demonstrations and the occasional riot. 

 A ruthless response by the government, characterised by the killing of protesters and a two-month internet shutdown in English-speaking regions, has hardened antagonisms, pitching the West African country into deep crisis and raising questions about its survival as a unified state.

Amid growing secessionists mutterings, Britain has become more active in recent days in attempting to defuse the confrontation. Last week Brian Olley, the British High Commissioner to Cameroon, met Paul Biya, the country’s 84-year-old president, and is understood to have called on him to end the use of force against protesters.

“We have raised our concerns with the government of Cameroon and will continue to raise these issues, including allowing access to the internet,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

Protests in Cameroon in December 2016 

But such quiet diplomacy has also angered some Anglophone activists, who accuse Britain of abandoning its responsibilities in the former British Southern Cameroons, which united with the much larger French Cameroons in 1961.

“Britain made us what we are and now most people in Britain don’t even know we exist,” an activist involved in the demonstrations said.

Despite the anger, Anglophone Cameroonians, who make up less than a fifth of the county’s 23m people, remain stubbornly loyal to their colonial traditions. To the bewilderment and often the derision of French speakers, they insist on forming orderly queues, referring to bars as “off-licences” and dressing up their judges and lawyers in powdered wigs. 

Both British common law and the GCE O-and-A-level syllabus remain deeply cherished.

It is a loyalty that has rarely been reciprocated by Britain.

 

Daniel Mekobe Sone; Cameroon's head of the Supreme Court

 The British Cameroons were made famous by the writings of naturalist Gerald Durrell, who visited in the Forties to search for the elusive hairy toad. He was memorably assisted by an uproarious Anglophone king, the Fon of Bafut, a gin-and-bitters-swilling pidgin speaker with a large retinue of drum-playing, bosom-jiggling wives whom Durrell taught the Conga. 

But Britain generally wanted little to do with the place. William Gladstone turned down a plea for annexation from local kings in 1884, allowing Bismark to take it for Germany.

After the First World War, Britain turned over five-sixths of the territory to France, agreeing to an arbitrary border line drawn up by Francois Georges-Picot, the French diplomat jointly responsible for the Middle East’s controversial modern boundaries.

Heartbroken local kings, like the Sultan of Bamum, protested in vain.

“I wish to follow the King of England and to be his servant, together with my country, so that we may be freshened with dew,” the sultan wrote in a letter to George V “who puts the evil men to flight and the troublesome to prison.”

After independence in 1960, the British Cameroons were wooed into union with the much larger French Cameroons by a promise that they would be equal members of a federal, bilingual state — a pledge broken when the federal constitution was abandoned in 1972.

Since then, English speakers say they have been shut out of jobs, denied fair political representation and deprived of revenues from oil, much of which is extracted from former British territory.

A woman in northern Cameroon Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Matters came to a head in November when a group of lawyers staged a small protest outside the courthouse in Bamenda, Cameroon’s largest Anglophone city, to demand the withdrawal of judges who spoke no English and had no understanding of British common law. The protest was broken up with tear gas.

The authorities must have assumed that, as in the past, the protests would peter out. Instead, the movement grew, drawing in Anglophone teachers, angered by state attempts to replace them with French speakers with knowledge of neither English nor the GCE syllabus.

Students joined in too, only to see their halls of residence raided and female students beaten and sexually abused by the police, according to activists.

The government admits to six protester deaths, though activists say the true toll is much higher.

With force alone appearing to fail, Mr Biya has since January attempted to seal off Anglophone Cameroon from the outside world by cutting off internet access to the two regions.

An absolutist gerontocrat who has clung to power through a series of controversial elections, there are signs that even French-speakers are finally losing patience with a leader who spends so much time in Europe his people view him as an absentee landlord.

Last October a Cameroonian stood outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva, where the president is said to have spent most of the Summer, and hurled insults at Mr Biya through a loud-hailer.

Cameroon's President Paul Biya Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Since then the president has shown signs of increasing paranoia. He was mocked by even French speakers after the present Miss Cameroon was stripped of her crown in January, allegedly for calling on the government to listen to Anglophone concerns.

So far, however, there is little sign that Mr Biya will relent. Most of the leaders of the protest movement have been arrested in recent weeks and charged with “terrorism, hostility against the fatherland, secession, revolution, contempt of the president… group rebellion, civil war and dissemination of fake news.”

Facing the death penalty, their trial before a military tribunal has shown Cameroon’s problems in microcosm. Bewigged defence lawyers, seated across the room from bare-headed Francophone prosecutors, struggled to follow proceedings conducted in French. When an interpreter was eventually provided the translation was so poor that few were any the wiser.

It is a sign, Anglophone Cameroonians say, that they will never be understood or accepted by the French speaking majority.

“The Anglophones are a people,” Henry Ngale Monono, a barrister, wrote recently in a Cameroonian newsletter. “We have a common culture, a common language. The Francophones want is to think like them behave like them, act like them — which is not possible.”

Written By 

Adrian Blomfield, Nairobi

Source

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/18/nation-divided-tensions-mount-cameroon-english-speakers-marginalisedby/

Federalism or a two-state solution: Exploring the options for a lasting solution to the crisis in Cameroon

Paul Biya-President of Cameroon since 1982

Photograph — AFP

The recent developments in the crisis that has engulfed Cameroon, particularly the English speaking region of the country, have shown that the crux of the battle goes beyond language. It is a battle for survival where a largely marginalised people are challenging a western import that has abused them and seen them pushed to the periphery since the unceremonious solemnisation of the union in 1961. It is a battle for recognition, for equality, and for survival. Hence, a fix of just the language, if it does happen, might just not be the ultimate solution.

It all started in November when the people of Bamenda, which if southern Cameroon were to be a country, will be the capital of the English-speaking region, took to the street to protest the continuous marginalisation by the government. Days before the protest, policemen went into a school where students were protesting the use of French in English regions to harass the students and teachers, hit them with police batons while dragging career lawyers by their clothes. In the aftermath of the physical assault, the people fearing for their lives at the hand of the police, who had now become instruments of oppression, announced a stay at home to protest the continuous oppression. The strike which has seen schools and courts closed has now entered its third month.

The English-speaking Cameroonians are protesting what they describe as political and economic marginalisation, in which language is being used as the ultimate weapon. The Paul Biya-led government in June 2016 started posting French-speaking teachers and lecturers to schools and tertiary institutions in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon. The act was not limited to schools, as French-speaking judges who had no knowledge of English common laws, which operates in the English-speaking region, were posted to adjudicate and preside over court sessions. This was done, I believe, to force the people, who would not want to remain incommunicado, to pick up French if they would want to remain relevant in their own country. The plan, however, failed to score its goal as the people took to the street in November 2016 to protest it, while also calling for the implementation of de facto and de jure bilingualism and federalism in the country.

If the intentions of the government are true, implementation of a federal state should not be hard. However, the continual denial of the existence of a people marginalised in two of the ten regions of the country shows that the government is only interested in achieving a ‘One Cameroon’ of their own vision, and they are prepared to do that by any means possible.

For one, the government does not see the use of French-speaking judges in English-speaking regions as an anomaly, let alone an imposition. Speaking in November 2016, the Cameroonian Minister in charge of special duties in the presidency, Atanja Nji reportedly said there was no Anglophone problem in Cameroon. This view was also corroborated by the Minister of Communication, Issa Tchiroma Bakary while speaking on Aljazeera’s AJstream. Apparently, the imposition is only normal, while in contrast, an English-speaking judge cannot preside over a court in any of the French-speaking regions. How normal is that?

While the importance of achieving a country of one people cannot be overemphasised, there is also the place of respecting a people’s right to self-determination. As a matter of fact, monolingualism is not the way, the only way to unify a country. Canada is officially a bilingual country which is excelling and the people are living as Canadians – not English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians.

English speaking Cameroonians are not demanding an imposition on the French-speaking regions of Cameroon, they are only demanding that they be treated as a people with yearnings and aspirations. That they be given jobs that belong to them not discriminated on the basis of their language, and not be made slaves in their own community.

In reply to their demands, the government for the past two months has shut down internet connections over the English speaking regions, while assaults continued on the frontiers of the resistance, and every other English-speaking Cameroonian the lawless policemen fall upon. Untold carnage and crime against humanity have being perpetrated by Paul Biya while the world watches on. The UN being widely regarded as the watchdog of world politics sits by as well while a people’s right to self-determination is violently violated.

In spite of all this, the government of Paul Biya has continued to maintain and deny the existence of a problem –not even a language problem – in the region. They are, by that way, lending credence to the atrocities of the police, showing that their actions are backed by the government. What is happening in Cameroon is basically a recolonisation of the English-speaking people by the France-backed French speaking regime of the country. Even though the constitution of the land clearly spells out French and English as the official languages of the country, official documents continue to be rendered in French, with no English translation.

This already shows that the government does not recognise a people different from the majority. For all they care, there is only one Cameroon, there should be only one Cameroon, and there must be only one Cameroon. Cameroon today is a product of a union between the French-speaking Republique de Cameroon and the English-speaking Southern Cameroon who opted to join the republic in a federal union while the northern English-speaking Cameroon opted to join Nigeria.

The plan to unify Cameroon cannot be realised with the use of force. A people cannot be kept in a union against their wishes. And their wish here is simple. The government should either recognise them as a people and a part of a Cameroon that houses two different people that can be made one or allow the people have their own state. Self-determination is a fundamental human right.

The Cameroonian government has two options: federalism or a two-state solution.  However, Paul Biya is having none of that. The reactions of his government so far have shown that they are far from accepting anything that tends towards independence for southern Cameroon. For one, they would have to acknowledge the existence of a problem between the two regions which until now they have failed to do. Nothing can be done in that regard. And with a pact signed with France to invade in the wake of any perceived break or crack in the unholy union, a defiant push for a two-state solution might turn out into a full-blown civil war.

However, given that the idea of a two-state solution appears expensive, not necessarily in terms of money, and too far-fetched as it remains foreign to Africa, the closest and efficient solution would an establishment of true federalism in Cameroon. A federalism which allows both regions to develop at their own pace, able to control the majority of resources in their region. This solution will allow for the propagation of preferred language in every setting within both regions without any problem. It would also mean that the Cameroon constitution would not only recognise English as an official language, as it presently does, it will also enforce the use of both languages of English and French in any and all official settings.

This would enforce the teaching of both languages at schools, which means every Cameroonian child will grow up to be competent in both English and French. And since this proposition is also contained in the very agreement that brought these once separate peoples together in 1961, the best thing for the government to resolve the lingering crisis is to honour the agreement, or allow the English speaking region to form a country of their own.

Author

Olumide Jokotade

http://venturesafrica.com/federalism-or-a-two-state-solution-exploring-the-options-for-a-lasting-solution-to-the-crisis-in-cameroon/