53 Years Later: Recreating a Community Spirit and an Identity
Dear Mr Edwin Ngang
I write in reaction to your post of yesterday wherein you used words like Pan-Cameroon (an escalation from your usual Pan-Kamerun) and then you bemoaned something I had stated before that our people no longer have a community and an identity: Reason why they cannot express their right to self-determination fully.
In fact, I agree with you totally on the above.
But I believe that a committed person and an activist like you can show leadership by recreating that sense of community and preserving that identity.
One of my Pastors, Dr. Myles Monroe defines leadership as follows: “Leadership is the capacity to influence others through inspiration motivated by passion, generated by vision, produced by a conviction, ignited by a purpose.”
Yes, you can and I will show you how.
I take the calculated risk of making this public because I believe that every Southern Cameroonian at home and abroad should get involved in this. Compatriots, wherever you are, show leadership in this and you would have struck a blow for us all.
Let us start doing this yesterday.
Groups do not matter.
Start this wherever you are and wherever you belong.
Once more: “Leadership is the capacity to influence others through inspiration motivated by passion, generated by vision, produced by a conviction, ignited by a purpose.”
Inventing Southern Cameroons Incorporated.
Start now, start today.
Look around you.
Create a Precinct of Southern Cameroonians.
Every precinct must have 20 members only. And, in the Wide USA you can create as many Precincts as a Mighty One like you can. Initially just get together once a Week to talk, share and discuss as a People. Discuss you country, its future, its problems and its future.
Then do this very essential thing: Elect a Precinct Chairman, a Permanent Secretary a Treasurer and a Financial Secretary.
Start a Microfinance scheme going.
Save $10 per head every week for both the men and women and $5 per head for every child, even the yet-to-be born.
What if you are – and I think you are – this Might One who can create 2000 Precincts in the USA? I repeat every precinct must have only 20 members and hence the saving round can only last 20 weeks.
Move the 21st member into a New Precinct even if Precinct 02 meets in the same place.
This is not a Njangi.
This is buying shares into an Eternal, Undying company called Southern Cameroons Incorporated.
And shares are not to be mismanaged.
80% of the shares belong to the precinct while 20% belong to the state: Call it taxes but these taxes will be managed by the Secretary for the Treasury and the Head of Government Business. We will eventually see if these shares can be bought and sold.
Precincts will eventually be transformed into Local Government Areas and then Counties but we would have started a form of economic emancipation at grassroots. That sense of independence will flow naturally.
We will be shooting many birds with one stone especially capturing hearts. See the principle of capturing hearts: Mt 6:21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Lu 12:34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
I know this for fact. We will have invented for ourselves a strong community, an identity and a sense of A PEOPLE once we have the possible 350.000 precincts available up and working. Mr. Ngang, have you considered how much money we can raise if we have 350.000 precincts at home and in the Diaspora saving maximum $ 10 a week?
That is weekly savings of $3.500.000!
Then we can take care of our business easily.
The State can easily come to the rescue of those in need.
But more importantly, the Head of Government Business can provide very important services to the people.
This is self-government, despite and in spite of the colonizer.
The One Recruit One Formula
Mr. Ngang, the ONE-RECRUIT ONE[1] Formula in Missionary work has been known to evangelize 2.000.000 people in 20 Days. We can pass a message to the population of Southern Cameroons and more in 23 days!
Power Politics, Structural and Cultural Violence, Economic Cleansing
Mr. Ngang, I believe that you are unfair to our people when you bemoan and rather blame them for the effects of a Pan-Kamerun (Cameroun) syndrome rather that understanding how it comes about. The colonizer is now indulging in what I term Power Politics and the subjugation of the Southern Cameroons. Power politics is a form of structural violence. The coloniser also indulges in a form of structural violence called cultural violence.
Structural violence is a term commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung, which he introduced in the article "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research" in 1969.[1] It refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. 'Cultural violence' refers to aspects of culture that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence, and may be exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science.[3]
Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look or feel "right," or at least not wrong, according to Galtung.[4]
Wikepedia defines power politics as a state of international relations in which states protect their own interests by threatening potential rivals and insurgents with military, economic, or political aggression.[2]
Power politics is essentially a way of understanding the world of international relations: nations compete for the resources and it is to a nation's advantage to be manifestly able to harm others. It prioritizes national self-interest over the interest of other nations or the international community.
Techniques of power politics include, but are not limited to, outright deployment of troops, appointment of proconsuls, conspicuous nuclear development, pre-emptive strike, blackmail, the massing of military units on a border, the imposition of tariffs or economic sanctions, bait and bleed and bloodletting, hard and soft balancing, buck passing, covert operations, shock and awe, asymmetric warfare.[3]
Extreme power politics can lead to a phenomenon which this study would want to characterize as economic cleansing. Economic cleansing and genocide are articulate warfarist strategies. Their exclusionist and ‘starve-them-to-death-like rats’ modus operandi are common in the theatre where the ‘we versus them’ groundswells in individual and group interactions are never managed through free and fair democratic competition, the respect of social justice, and the general live-and-let-live but rather through a modern form of Social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest. The fittest herein is defined as the group or aggregate, which through subterfuge, unbelievable luck or by sheer force, is able to hijack a state and hence control all resources, events, outcomes and influence.
The Francophonizing Agenda
Every time the colonizer creates a new law affecting Southern Cameroonians, his intention is not to provide services but to colonize and dismantle that sense of identity and community extant in the Southern Cameroons since 1922.
Take an example. When you scrap the Southern Cameroons Parliament in Buea you are actually saying that henceforth look up to the National Assembly in Yaounde. When you scrap Powercam, you cause our children most of whom were born after 1961 to start talking about SONEL. When they sneak francophonie values into our education system, they cause our children to be frogs.
There is nothing stealthy about the motives and mores of the Francophonie. The Francophonie is an overt warfariest agenda. The Francophonie was invented to expand the influence of France and French worldwide. At the expense of English and Anglo-Saxon values.
In Cameroun, the main agenda of the Francophonie is to francophonize Southern Cameroonians. Listen to this, chutzpah from a francophone minister, a certain Hamadou Moustapha, former Vice -Prime Minister In charge of Housing and Town Planning, in Jeune Afrique Economie, 207, 20 Nov 1995 page 3:
‘A un moment donné' effectivement, on a commencé à oublier que les anglophones étaient la, on a eu l’impression que les anglophones s'étaient déjà francophonisés"
Or for a spell we almost forgot that the anglophones were here, we had the impression that they had been francophonized.
Mr. Ngang, it is today so bad that you cannot create an All-Southern Cameroonian business. The will move in an either insist that you make a francophone a shareholder or they tax you out of existence. This has forced our people to bend over backwards to be snookered in the rear by francophones.
Hannah Arendt’s observation that: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any,” can be applied here to mean that the agenda of the Francophonie has never been to foster English and Anglo-Saxon values but to efface even the little available.
A people without a state in quest of a state
Mr. Ngang, we can beat the system.
We must recreate the idea of a community, an identity and a nation. Pastor Chris Oyakhilome says ‘the purpose of a nation – every nation - is the realization of human aspirations. It is in pursuance of man’s dreams and desires for happiness, prosperity, self-expression, ecological development, self-fulfillment; his unsearchable and unending desire for self-discovery and the maximization of man’s intellectual, physical and spiritual abilities,’ that agglomerates of people – yesterday, today and tomorrow established nations among themselves. Man cannot achieve all his aspirations in isolation but in his relationship with like-minded creatures.’
Like-minded creatures.
The Southern Cameroonian like-mindedness is conferred upon us by what Ernst Renan argued to be the most important element in a modern nation: a communal imagined past. Ernst Renan – a Frenchman, for God’s sake - was the also the first to relate the continuum between nations, their history, nationalism and the will to live together. Renan’s anchor on nationhood as being based on the ‘will to live together’ as delivered in the Sorbonne in 1882 remains unchallenged to date.
The anglophone-francophone experiment in nation-building has failed. It was a non-starter: dead at inception. Because there is no likemindedness. Because there is no will to live together. Because the other side remains dubious and hell-bent on annexation, subjugation, assimilation and colonization.
Per Pastor Oyakilome, the purpose of a state – any state – ‘is to provide and establish justice, domestic tranquility, and common defense; promote general welfare and secure postulated ethnicity. The state is to enact laws and provide force to ensure that defined limits that are not exceeded.’
The neo-colonial governing contraption existing in Cameroun since 1960 vindicates all the paradigms of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Oppenheimer’s codification of a state as “a sociological concept.” The state, completely in its genesis . . . is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. As a result the new states are forced to organize on military principles. The life of the state is regimented allegiance. The military by nature is competitive; hence the state thrives on competition. Teleological, this competition and ensuing dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. [i]
Historically speaking therefore there is not the slightest difficulty in proving that all contemporary political communities (states etc) owe their existence to successful warfare.
And de Jouvenel continues, "The state is in essence the result of the successes achieved by a band of brigands who superimpose themselves on small, distinct societies." The brigands, by necessity invent for themselves a head brigand (the Chef or Patron) and exercise power at the central government because they have the elements of constraint (army, navy, gendarmerie, airforce, police, secret service, DGRE, etc.) to do their bidding. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun said Mao Tse Tung.
We are a people without a state in search of a state and we must find that state while preserving whatsoever remains of our community, our identity and our peopleness.
Why must we do this thing?
Because we are like-minded creatures.
Because we are Men of Honour.
Men of Honour do not fail.
Men of Honour do not hand down to their children a small matter that they can resolve themselves.
Let’s do this.
Prophet Ntemfac Ofege
Chair – SCAPO-WAM
[1] The ONE-RECRUIT ONE strategy is anchored on a time-tested rapid result and fast-tract Evangelism Formula. Per this formula, it is possible to mobilize twice the population of the Southern Cameroons in 24 Days as demonstrated by the Chart Below.
Day 1 2
Day 2 4
Day 3 8
Day 4 16
Day 5 32
Day 5 64
Day 6 128
Day 7 256
Day 8 512
Day 9 1.024
Day 10 2.048
Day 11 4.096
Day 12 8.192
Day 13 16.364
Day 14 32.768
Day 15 65.536
Day 16 131.072
Day 17 262.144
Day 18 524.288
Day 19 1.048.576
Day 20 2.097.152
Day 21 4.194.304
Day 22 8.388.608
Day 23 16.777.216
In 23 Days, were EACH Southern Cameroon to free another Southern Cameroonian, we would have freed twice the population of Southern Cameroons!
[2] .[1] The term was coined in Martin Wight's 1979 book of the same name, which the Times Literary Supplement dubbed the 18th most influential book since World War II. Also see. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Hans Köchler, "The United Nations Organization and Global Power Politics: The Antagonism between Power and Law and the Future of World Order," in: Chinese Journal of International Law, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2006), pp. 323-340.
[i] Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15: Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 100–01. Quoted in Tatah Mentan..Democracy in Cameroun.
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