At first thought, it seems such a crazy idea to compare the American electorate and the Cameroonian voter.
Secondly, it provides a unique opportunity to examine who the voters really are in both systems. And finally it is a perfect opportunity to actually test the knowledge base, maturity or lack thereof and erudition of the Cameroonian elite, who more often than not, arrogate the rights to themselves to act as political pundits with the prerogative and priority to pontificate and even prognosticate the future of American elections.
The main difference between the American and the Cameroonian electorate is not education or lack thereof. That is the availability of education to the American electorate and the lack of it to the Cameroonian electorate. This is not the case.
The gaping distance between these two electorates lies in the consciousness, awareness and empowerment of the one while the other is helpless and hapless in the face of its euthanization from the malice that emanates from incompetence, insensitivity, corruption and ineptitude of its leadership.
In 1776 when the American Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, few Americans had the
education, culture and background that Southern Cameroonians had at their independence in 1961 (do not fight about the date because I am conscious of January 01, 1960 and I am deliberately leaving it out because it is not relevant to the audience that I am addressing in this discourse).
In 1776 the “independent thirteen colonies” were a “jungle of the wild west” where the survival of the fittest was the rule- controversies and arguments were openly settled by street and sword fights.
In fact, even a presidential debate was settled by sword fights – I guess you did not know!!
The point is that America grew out of it and then gave the World the study guide on how to build, maintain and sustain a democracy.
As painstaking, annoying and even criminal as it was, Americans learned from it. They did not only learn from it, Americans grew from it.
They did not only grow from it they taught the world, by example, what democracy is, who it is for, for whom
it is meant and most importantly, how it should be practiced.
It is amazing to note, as a point of history, that when Cameroon was colonized by the Portuguese, Germans and then the English and French, women could not vote and slaves were not considered ‘full’ human beings, in the United States.
Progressively, women could vote. Then slaves were ‘freed’. These slaves became “blacks”, “coloreds” and “Negroes”. They were in the physical continent of America but they were not Americans.
This was reality in 1945 when the United Nations replaced the League of Nations. Yet the United Nations, in principle, recognized the citizens of trusteeship territories as full human beings.
In 1961, Southern Cameroons was independent. Blacks or African Americans were ‘three quarter’ humans, in the United States.
Southern Cameroons citizens, at least by the UN standards, were “full” human beings. Barrack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 to a Kenyan (black) father and a Kansas (white) mother. The politically correct term for it today is an interracial birth.
When Barrack Obama was born, his father and mother could not hold hands and walk down the street in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and the rest of the United States.
Barack Obama, Sr and Ann Dunham could not have a date in a reputable restaurant in all of the fifty States of the United States of America. It was illegal. It was inappropriate. It was immoral. It was unconscionable. It was anti-miscegenation.
Americans opened their eyes. Americans organized. Americans marched. Americans protested and
engaged in civil disobedience.
Americans were killed. Americans were dehumanized. Americans were mutilated. Americans, especially African Americans suffered the brunt.
This period was dark and ugly. Even so, Americans stood strong, like one man, one woman and one child. Even so, even the darkest forces of America were overpowered and a new era dawned on all ‘these’ fifty states.
The law was passed and people changed. The laws came raining, snowing or blowing like the rain, the snow or the wind and these all fifty states changed. And everybody admired it. Then loved it. Then envied it – the United States, I mean.
Between his birth and the election of Barrack Obama in 2008 is just shy of fifty years. This, in ‘African political years’, is unbelievable, unthinkable and unimaginable. This, to the ‘Cameroonian Diary’ is inconceivable!! My god (OMG), how do you expect an incompetent, inept, and a compromised sycophant to believe that change is possible within a generation or two?
The difference between American progressism, liberation and humanism and Cameroonian inhumanity, insensitivity and depravity is not a function of some religious, spiritual purity and superior humanity.
It is rather a function of leadership that is shaped by the courageousness, or lack thereof, of its citizenry.
It is not because JFK was kind that he sent down the federal troops to Alabama and Mississippi but because of the pressure that well meaning and conscientious ‘white liberals, progressives and humanists’ with all the advantages of ‘white privilege’ who were ready to sacrifice everything and every prerogative, put on the JFK administration that federal troops were dispatched to Alabama to protect ‘integration’.
It was not out of pity and sheer good heartedness that the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled in Brown V. Board of Education, ruling once and for all that ‘separate’ was not ‘equal’.
This was the work of conscientious activists lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshal and backed by the unspoken and greatly distinguishable research, advocacy, representation and persuasion of white ‘advantaged’ varied communities including Jews and Irish – groups who in their own special ways knew deeply what and how discrimination felt.
If these groups had held steadfast to their age old ideas, convictions and prejudices about black inferiority, the status quo would have been maintained and Barrack Obama would never have become President of the United States.
It is the inherent ability of the United States to find the courage within its own very population to self purge, to self purify and self sanctify that makes her the beacon of the World.
On the contrary, the Cameroonian elite is hungry, petty, selfish and incapable of rising above their sense appetites. Because of this debaseness, they couch their depravity in impunity – beginning with their commander in chief down to the house keeper with a ‘matricule’ number.
This impunity breeds the kind of indifference that comes with a lack of accountability. This is because the fundamental law of the land can be truncated at any moment to suit the status quo and the regime and its sycophants.
Police officers kill citizens with reckless abandon because they are militarized and therefore see their fellow citizens as ‘others’ to be ‘taught’ a lesson since they are mere ‘dogs’ or ‘enemies’ in the house.
Police officers see themselves and their corps not as ‘peace keepers’ but as a hammer of the regime to put dissidents in their place. As such they can frame, prosecute and incarcerate innocence with impunity.
The Cameroun military does not kill in the NW and SW regions because they are not well trained. Rather they are very well trained by France and Israel.
They do not pillage and plunder because they are ignorant of international instruments and rules of engagement including the laws of armed conflict.
Unfortunately, they kill because North Westerners and South Westerners are viewed as “Biafrans”, “terrorists”, “foreigners” and “two cubes of sugar”.
That is why “NoSo” (notice how this acronym is coined from the French “Nord Ouest/Sud Ouest”) is viewed as “enemies” in the house, “secessionists” and very dangerous for “national unity” and the “indivisibility” of Cameroun.
Corruption is not over ripe and rampant in Cameroun because people are just decadent, immoral, uncivilized and unsympathetic.
Corruption has crystallized in Cameroun because of the legalization of the cult of political deification and sycophancy that has been nurtured in the manure of nepotism, favoritism, tribalism, cronyism through lawlessness and nonexistent prosecutions to crowing impunity and rock like effrontery.
Justice in Cameroun is a farce that is offered everyday to the greatest bidder not just because of the hegemony of ENAM but also because of the ineptitude, laziness and lackluster attitude of the lawyers who have completely capitulated to the overzealousness of the “special” Magistrate class that has been intentionally created to stratify an otherwise culturally and linguistically threatened society.
The calculated resistance to the universal idea of law schools foments the concoction that is fostering this madness.
Unemployment is incurable in Cameroun because corruption, bribery, fraud and embezzlement have replaced entrepreneurial industriousness, programmed and plan investments as well as visionary and mission oriented companies pillared on sound and sustainable economic foundations, principles and practices.
When theft, corruption and graft become an integral element of the national character there is no incentive to invest in the sustainability of talent, promise and the entrepreneurial spirit.
When civil service becomes the main source of employment in the country, loans and borrowing become the only way of sustaining an unsustainable endeavor.
Arguably there were two FREE AND FAIR ELECTION in Southern Cameroons in 1954, when Parliament was formed and E.M.L Endeley and on February 1st, 1959 wherein John Ngu Foncha defeated and replaced Endeley as Prime Minister.
These were legitimately and genuinely held election. Then the rest was history wherein the false, fake and unfulfilled Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) cascaded into a unitary fiasco which has now ended up at the sacrificial altar of restoration and separation.
From 1960 to date, no Camerounais can boast of ever witnessing any fundamentally fair and free elections wherein the people as the grassroots of every democracy can nostalgically, satisfactorily and gratefully self affirm and self realize, through a complete, legitimate and transparent ballot process.
The impunity or better still the immunity with which the Ahidjo/Biya junta has rigged elections in Cameroun has given a notorious license of a foreboding certainty that has condemned the Cameroonian electorate to an apocalyptic dismality that has provoked an incurable apathy and a sickening sense of helplessness that is fatalistic.
This is a perfect recipe for collective political suicide, inertia, retrogression and national annihilation.
The power and energy that fuels the gigantic and historic republican machinery of American politics lies in the orgasmic ecstasy of knowing that one’s vote will count at the ballot – at the local, municipal, state and federal level.
Every American is almost always sure as dying or paying taxes as they are to have their votes counted and influential in every election – be it on the local School Board, for Mayor of the City Council, for State Governor, for State House and Senate Representative, for US House and Senate Representatives and then for President of the United States (albeit through the indirect ballot of the electoral college, in the case of President of the United States).
It is true that every system ever so often has its flukes. The US voting process is no exception.
Even so, these flukes are far and few between so that when this is put within the context of the totality of fifty States (most of these Fifty States with populations equal or larger than most of the 54 African Countries), three hundred million American citizens, the stability of the American republic, the welfare, security and life spans of the average American as well as the immigration push and pull of the rest of the world towards the United States, there is no doubt that America’s electoral flukes should be appreciated for what they are – flukes.
In fact, the system has proven itself as a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The magical wand about the American political system is that whenever an abnormality occurs within the giant system, it can be corrected, rectified and regulated again generally, within an acceptable period of time that has been built into the system through local ordinances, state laws, federal Statutes, State Constitutions and the Constitution of the United States of America – the Supreme law of the Land.
All these laws are faithfully interpreted by functional County, State and Federal Courts. These same interpretations, otherwise called Judgments and precedents, are religiously executed by the executive arm of all governments – at the municipal and city council level by the Mayors and their city councils, through their local police.
At the State level by the State Governor, his County, his State Troopers, Sheriffs and State Prosecutors. At the federal level by the President of the United States, the Attorney General and federal Marshals.
The colossal magnitude and fortitude of the American military in all its facets is measured and valued by the number of deployments planned and effected around the world to protect the strategic national interest of the United States.
The American military is constituted, trained and deployed to defend against its enemies, foreign and domestic. The American military can never be deployed on a segment of its own populations.
I can hear the skeptics going through the roof shouting how the federal army was deployed during the civil war against Americans. I can also hear these same pointing out that the national guard is always deployed in periods of natural disasters like the devastations caused after horrible hurricanes, earthquakes and floods.
Even so, these arm chair critics fail to know that the confederate army, during the civil war, was actually constituted by an organized army under a professional and identified command structured that was manned by the national guard professional soldiers of the confederate southern slave labor propagating states.
The domestic enemy of the United States during the civil war was not a peoples’ grassroots yearning for self determination and realization.
The Union army was fighting a deviant capitalistic offshoot of American capitalism that was bent on maintaining the slave industry. This idea went squarely and dangerously against the founding idea of America.
This idea is sacrosanct in the
American Constitution that “ALL MEN” are created equal, and endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The aim and purpose of the confederate army was to eternally continue the idea that the slave, who in large measure, was of African descent, was not equal to his Caucasian counterpart and therefore could not enjoy those inalienable rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This was contrary to the idea of America. This contrarian idea was an enemy of the republic, as understood by Lincoln, and the Union Army. This is why the civil war raged for four years.
It will and should surprise the typical Cameroun electorate to learn that the army of the United States can never be unleashed on the citizens of the United States, for protesting, expressing a political opinion, demonstrating or even advocating separation and independence from the Union of the fifty states (in fact this is the continuous situation with Texas) – the fact that the Camerounais army (Gendarmerie, GPIGN, air force, B.I.R., Special Forces, Marines and other covert branches) has been openly fighting in NoSo can never be comprehended by the American voter – at the local, state or federal level.
This commentary is prompted by an incident that occurred at an occasion somewhere in the NoSo whereby an eloquent elite, albeit very misguided, was effusively praising Donald Trump for being a “Strong Man” who was making America “Great Again”.
He went on to cite Trump’s disrespect for NATO, his resolve to end immigration, his loathing of immigrants, especially dishonest Africans and Cameroonians who were ‘flooding’ America. He actually ended up by saying that “if every African leader, including Cameroun, could love their countries like Trump loves America” the world would be a better place.
This erudite then pontificated and prognosticated that “Trump will be acquitted by the Senate and he will WIN A SECOND TERM”. Everybody was silent.
I do not know whether it was out of reverence, spite or ignorance. I then thought I would turn to The Rambler and “Tell it as it is, no matter what”.
It is dangerously paradoxical to imagine that Donald Trump’s isolationist and nationalist policies and administration will be adored and idealized by some Cameroonian elite.
A cursory visit down memory lane will reveal that all the other famous fascists, nazists and dictators, the world over, started up as nationalists, protectionists and isolationists – Hitler, Franco and Idi Amin – Yes Idi Amin.
I guess Idi Amin’s illegally forcing whites, Indians and Asians out of Uganda, was a form of Making Uganda Great by decreeing “Uganda for Ugandans”.
I guess when Cameroun with the complicity of Nigeria kidnaps, abducts, disappears registered refugees and asylum seekers, in fragrant violation of international and national laws, and then condemn the NERA TEN to life imprisonment; this is a trumpian version of Making Nigeria and Cameroun Great.
The revered elite’s prognostics about the upcoming elections in the United States pre-supposes that the influence of NATO will continue to dwindle in the face of Trump’s dismissive and diminutive treatment of the World’s greatest security organization that has maintained world peace and prevented a third World War since 1945.
This myopic approach fails completely to acknowledge that the security of Africa is inextricably tied up to the security of the NATO alliance.
By supporting Trump’s irresponsible and fatalistic policies towards NATO we run the risk of calling down calamities on our African, I dare say Camerounais, heads before they stoop –rise of a nuclear Iran, proliferation of terrorist cells in European and African Countries (remember Sudan
and Al Qaeda? Remember Nigeria and Boko Haram?).
Trump’s anti-immigration and isolationist policies might have a very far-fetched phantasmagoric allure to a caged Cameroonian pundit, but the reality of the United States of America, as a beacon of hope to the World’s oppressed masses and citadel of refugees and asylum seekers cannot be underestimated or overemphasized by all level headed and reasonable citizens of this world.
In fact, if the doors of the United States had been open to the NERA TEN -Sisiku Ayuk Tabe Julius,
Nfor Ngala Nfor, Tassang Wilfred Fombang, Henry kimeng, Cornelius Njikimbi Kwanga, Fidelis Che, Che Augustine Awasum, Egbe Ogork, Eyambe Elias Ebai and Shufai Blaise Sevidzem Berinyuy will not be languishing in Kondengui today.
Rather, the Restoration boat will be far off in the horizon towards its natural destination – BUEA.
I will conclude by daring to say that Donald J. Trump will be acquitted by the Senate but he WILL NOT WIN THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS. He will lose the electoral college vote by a landslide.
My prognostication is based on a real fear in the nefarious potentials that four more years of trumpian policies can and will cause to the World and my eternal hope and trust in the sapiens and collective conscientiousness, fortitude, resilience and foresight of the American electorate.
In the same vein, I trust that elections will HOLD in Cameroun in February and then WHAT?
Ancestral Mbomwei in Buea.