Cameroon

France’s Dysfunctional Puppet System in Africa

By: Janvier Tchouteu, Janvier Chouteu-Chando, Janvier T. Chando

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

As a German colony from 1884-1916, Kamerun was called "The African Pearl" for its human and material potential, and for its strategic position in Africa. The defeat of Germany in the First World War and the partition of the colony into British Cameroons and French Cameroon did not diminish the area's outsize role in the political and economic evolution of the continent. So, the quest by the land's civic nationalists to reunite the British-controlled and French-controlled territories and make Cameroon independent, raised concerns among the colonialists in Britain and France, who planned to retain the unchecked influence their countries were having in the former German colony.

Cameroon became independent and partially reunited in 1961, but with the exclusion of its civic nationalists who were banned, their leaders killed, imprisoned or exile, and the general population suppressed and cowed. Put in power in the pseudo-independent Cameroon, to maintain a system guaranteed by the colonial pact France made Cameroon and other Francophone territories to sign before granting them independence in the 1960s, was French puppet Ahmadou Ahidjo. The system is still in place today, albeit under the second puppet leadership of Paul Biya who has been in power for 44 years (10 years as Prime Minister and 34 years as President). Every passing year has exposed the system's unsustainability and absurdity as Cameroon declines and continues to lose its place as the "African Pearl" and the pace-setter in the Central African region.

But not until the rise to prominence of the once insignificant former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, a country without the constraints of a Colonial Pact, that has somehow harnessed its new-found oil wealth to develop the land to the point where it is on the verge of becoming a First World Nation, has its Francophone neighbors, of which Cameroon is the largest, suddenly become astir from the doldrums. Today, the citizens of these former French colonies whose leaderships are led by French puppets that have been squandering the resources of the land to satisfy their whims and the whims of their puppeteers, can no longer ignore the fact that the French-imposed system has nothing to offer.

Can Cameroon’s civic-nationalists, who are currently in disarray, whisk their country and the Central African region off seven decades of decay through a new system that would generate development and guarantee the values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights cherished by the rest of the civilized world?