An Open Letter to the Editor. Herald Comm. Inc. c/o Boniface Forbin Ph.D.
Dear Sir,
June 16th, 1999
Re-expulsion of the Herald correspondent from Bui Division
We read, with a lot of consternation, your editorial on the Monday 7th June 1999 newspaper on the expulsion of your correspondent Ngah Christian Mbigbo from Bui Division for publishing false information that has attracted the wrath of the Yaounde regime on the people of Bui. He raised a false alarm of an imminent SCNC terrorist attacks in the Division.
The publication of this horrendous unfounded story is today costing the people of Bui life, limb and liberty. Aware of the consequences of such blatant lies, the editor of The Herald ought to have slowed down in castigating “nwerong”, a traditional supreme council that acts as an administrative arm of governance in all Tikar clans. “Nwerong” will exile or expel people from the clan after judging and finding them guilty of bringing a curse to the land. Even princes are subject to this council. It props weak Monarchs and checks the excesses of the autocratic ones. This is an institution which the editor of The Herald is simply describing as the traditional police and calling on his collaborators our oppressors in Yaounde to abolish while at the same time feigning to call for the re-instatement of traditional rule. That editorial has indeed exposed you as the secret hand behind the various criminal offences committed against a valiant God-fearing people by your collaborators in Yaounde.
While aptly describing them as hoodlums in several issues of your paper you covertly operate with them to the detriment of the people of the Southern Cameroons.
You have at several instances demonstrated your hatred for the people especially those of the N.W. Province in your editorials and write-ups as will be evidenced from the following:
When Simon Achidi Achu was Prime Minister of La Republique du Cameroun, you made it a duty to publish negative articles about him. The gullible lovers of change in the Southern Cameroons were so delighted with the destruction of a CPDM big-wig that they failed to see the motives of the government sponsored agent which was to further entrench the divide and rule policy of his pay masters in Yaounde. You went as far as blaming the imposition of the 1992 state of emergency in the North West Province on Achidi Achu in order to better alienate him from his people. Curious enough though, you have not done the same on Prime Minister Mafany Musonge after the random arrests, torture, extra-judicial killings and the transfer of suspects from the Bamenda province to Yaounde soon after these government orchestrated terrorist attacks that took place in March 1997. Is it an oversight or a deliberate attempt to foster the divide and rule policy and lend credence to the Yaounde regime’s assertions that it is the “North Westerners” who want to secede? Are you not also trying to influence the military tribunal in Yaounde that is hearing the case of the detainees for the 1997 terrorist attacks in the North West Province?
Today, there reigns an uneasy calm between the Bakwerians and the people of Manyu and again over stories published by you which are just figments of your imagination. Can you remember the number of times you published stories about rivalry between Peter Agbor Tabi the then Minister of Higher Education and Peter Mafany Musonge the PM over the office of the Prime Minister of La Republique du Cameroun?
You trivialised a quarrel between a Priest and his Bishop and succeeded in converting it to a NW/SW quarrel with dire consequences for the Catholic faithful. If that matter remains unresolved till date, it is thanks to your manipulation of the masses especially those of your native Lebialem Division. We may go on and on enumerating such acts that have assisted in the destruction of the Southern Cameroons institutions.
Your latest attempt to destroy the SDF and the SCNC which for you and your paymasters’ convenience, you have always lumped together in your sordid attacks via unfounded stories about imminent terrorist attacks must be explained this time around.
You had earlier published a story about the SDF promising to resort to arms to bring change in the Cameroons. While reporting this story, you appended the photograph of the Chairman of the SCNC when the story was entirely SDF’s. Were you not by so doing trying to link up the 1997 terrorist attacks in the NW Province on both groups linked does the regime in Yaounde? The SCNC and the SDF have diametrically opposed objectives.
That story was a prelude to the succeeding one your correspondent published purporting to report on the commencement of the armed struggle as predicted in your previous write-up.
Why on earth should anyone living in the Cameroons link the non-functioning of telephones on terrorist attacks when it is common knowledge that our phones hardly ever work? Of late there has been a spate of telephone cable thefts in Yaounde, Douala, Bafoussam and elsewhere in the country with the cities left in communicable blackouts yet states of emergency have not been declared in any such towns or cities; why then was the case of Bui particular that the Herald had to link it with terrorists attacks?
Your correspondent who failed to report correctly your planted tall story, ought to look for some other excuses for his expulsion from Bui rather than blame it on the rivalry between the SDF mayors of Bui and Donga Mantung over the capital of the “proposed” Far North West Province. We use the word “proposed” here guardedly for we have borrowed this from your editorial. What we remember is that Hon. S.N. Tanyi in order to win the votes for his CPDM party used this as a ploy and promised the people such a Province with the capital in Nkambe. The word “proposed” here therefore directly links you to the government in Yaounde and your correspondents resort to the administration for intervention when expelled from Bui corroborates this assertion.
“Nwerong” called “Nwarong” in Donga Mantung Division, expelled Ngah Christian Mbigbo from Bui for bringing a curse to the land. What more could be a curse in the Southern Cameroons than the invasion of blood-thirsty gendarmes from La Republique du Cameroun? The people of Ndu in Donga Mantung can tell you better. Had he published the same article in his native Donga Mantung Division he would have received a similar treatment if not worse from “Nwarong”.
You have in thinly veiled language, called on your accomplices in Yaounde to abolish freedoms so that your paper may sell and we send more people to jail for you and your colleagues to eliminate. Rai Lawrence from Bui whose remains are somewhere in a mass grave in Yaounde is still very fresh in our memories. You have not called on the Minister of Territorial Administration to abolish extra-judicial killings and to release prisoners they have held for close to five years without charge but you have called on him to ban institutions that check the excesses of monarchs. This is very instructive indeed.
Don’t you think that in the light of the above cited cases we can now safely qualify you as the Joseph Goebbels of Yaounde junta? Goebbels for those who don’t know him was the propaganda secretary of the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. It was thanks to his invented stories that many a Jew and even Germans were slaughtered in cold blood, that later engendered the 2nd world war. He had a Ph.D in Philology and was a journalist. At the collapse of the third Reich he and his whole family committed suicide for they could not face the truth.
Dear Mr. Boniface Forbin Ph.D.,
Your naked attempt to incite tribal hatred and/or inter-tribal war between the brotherly peoples of Donga Mantung and Bui Division over the capital of your “proposed” Far North West Province has been unveiled. Like Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd of apartheid South Africa and your Yaounde masters’ solution to the perennial Southern Cameroons problem is the Bantustanisation of the territory else why the latest debate on the greater Manyu Province? Are you not doing this in furtherance of the Bantustanisation so as to continually deface the Southern Cameroons and deprive it of independence? That is too late. Brittle masses can no longer be deceived and we have caught you with your hands in the till.
Southern Cameroonians in general and the people of Bui in particular will live to remember you for your positive contribution to their collective happiness under the colonial rule of La Republique du Cameroun.
The Patriot
