The confusion within the ranks of the Yaoundé regime, appears to have reached fever pitch. This is explained by the many political miscalculations they have been making of recent, with the latest being the expulsion and ban of the prize-winning New York-based CameroUnian novelist’ Patrice Nganang, from his own country of birth.
Note that, Nganang is a literature professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is CameroUnian by birth and holds dual CameroUnian and US nationality. He was arrested on December 7 as he tried to board a flight to Kenya, at LRC’s economic Capital of Douala. The intellectual was accused of insulting and threatening the life of the colonial President, Paul Biya, through his Facebook posts.
However, the truth remains that, Patrice Nganang, was being witch hunted because of a December 5th missiles he fired at the regime through the Paris-based magazine, Jeune Afrique. In that critique, he excoriated the Biya’s regime for mismanaging the Ambazonian Revolution, through a ruthless crackdown on innocent and peaceful Ambazonians.
In a panic response to a US government’s 48 hour ultimatum, the bamboozled limping Yaoundé regime hurriedly backpedaled on the kangaroo judicial process against the US based academician. He was not only freed from the gulag where he had spent nearly three weeks, but the repressive regime confiscated his CameroUnaise passport and expelled him from the collapsing republic, with instructions never to return.
In expelling the award-winning poet, the imperial regime noted that “he is an American who does not have a right to this passport…” Paradoxically, more than 90 percent of regime authorities have been discovered to possess dual nationality.
Expelling a high profile and internationally renowned scholar from his supposed nation, simply because his contributions to nation building do not align with the interests of a dying regime, is not only preposterous, but a testament to the fact that the regime is totally confused and has ran out of options. Like one Ambazonian puts it, the colonial regime has only expelled Nganang from the Cameroons, but has not expelled his intellect and pen.
As an influential writer, it is an opportunity for him to sit and tackle the regime from any location in the world, with just a stroke of his pen, and a click on his computer. The regime will still feel the pinch in Yaoundé. After all, isn’t his pen that initially sent him to Kondengue? The scholar, has been educated and transformed within the global Anglo-Saxon culture. He therefore does not reason from with an assimilated mentality, but with a critico-analytic mind.
He better understands the facts of this revolution and has had the opportunity to interact with Ambazonian revolutionary minds in the Yaoundé dungeon. Like Comrade Atanga Achiri puts it, “his arrest was an accomplishment to school him on what the struggle is all about. He has been armed by the regime to spit fire …” in favour of the revolution. As we wait to read his first tirade after resting from the three weeks Kondengue trauma, we also look forward to the Yaoundé regime’s next political blunder.
James Agbor, BaretaNews Political Analyst.