Jakiri: “Agents Provocateurs” at Work, Again
By Ntumfoyn Boh Herbert (Yindo Toh)
Spokesperson, MoRISC

You don’t even have to think twice before proclaiming the truth. Our people neither attacked nor did they kill any gendarme in Jakiri. Our people would never even contemplate, talk less of committing such a heinous crime.

What the tragedy of Jakiri proves is that the colonizer in Yaounde is desperate. Very desperate! So desperate is the regime that it is willing to kill its own – if, indeed, the victim is a gendarme officer and not a prisoner they picked to sacrifice – in order to have some crime to charge the restoration campaign with.

To understand why this is the handiwork of the colonizer, ask yourself the following questions: would our people mask themselves before enforcing ghost towns or before demonstrating? Would our people, out to enforce ghost towns, know the combat techniques of taking down gendarmes, seizing weapons from them, and using said weapons to take out one gendarme officer and injure others? All without anyone of them being killed or injured or captured by the better-trained gendarmes engaging them in the shootout?

Would our people, reportedly out to enforce ghost towns, be skilled at disarming a gendarme, holding their own against a group of well-trained gendarmes? Would our people be skilled enough to shoot at the gendarmes, killing one of them, injuring one other and then escaping into the bushes without so much as one of them being caught? Or killed? Or injured? How many of our people reportedly out enforcing ghost towns know how to use a sophisticated instrument of war seized from a gendarme?

Here are a few more intriguing questions: are masked men generally among our people (those carrying tree branches as a sign of non-violence) or among those who are regularly armed and heavily masked – I mean elements of the dreaded BIR (Rapid Intervention Brigade)? Does the beating allegedly administered to the gendarmes not sound exactly like what BIR officers do for breakfast, lunch and supper?

I am ready to bet my last dollar – sorry, my very last Amba – that the so-called masked men, who could not be injured in their combat against gendarmes – are really “agents provocateurs” of the colonialist. Yaounde sent them in to Jakiri in the hope of creating and using the unfortunate skating of a gendarme to justify the collective punishment (a crime against humanity) the colonial forces are inflicting on inhabitants of Jakiri this night and in the days ahead.

The death of a gendarme officer is a tragedy Yaounde hopes to use to begin the process of painting the restoration campaign as terrorist. The aim of the blind repression unleashed after the body was found and pictures of it disseminated on WhatsApp is to, hopefully, break the resolve and spirit of one of the bravest Southern Cameroonian people (the descendants of the Warriors of Nso, as Hon. Joseph Wirba calls them). Yaounde knows that they have been the bravest, boldest soldiers of the non-violent campaign for restoration and the regime is keen to inflict as much pain on them as the French colonialists did on the Bassa and Bamileke people.

The choice of Jakiri, home of the firebrand SDF MP, Hon. Joseph Wirba, is no accident. The Honorable Wirba has just committed the mortal sin of detailing the full extent of the carnage of last September 22 and October 1st in a newly-released report. Yaounde wants to break Jakiri just as much as it wants to dissolve Ambazonia like two cubes of sugar in a bowl of water. Jakiri isn’t an accident, I was saying. Not anymore than Ewelle II village in the outskirts of Mamfe (home of Sisiku AyukTabe) was an accident, post October 1st.

The colonial regime was already desperate in Mamfe, where it tried but failed to plant the dead bodies of officers. The regime announced that their soldiers had come under fire from so-called assailants. They even claimed that deaths of soldiers had occurred; that some had been injured in running battles in Mamfe. Just as they did today with Jakiri, the colonialists managed to get a few online platforms to run with their “invented” news and self-inflicted tragedy.

On the supposed deaths recorded in Mamfe, the regime circulated some old pictures of mortal remains in military gear claiming to be soldiers killed by pro-restoration assailants. The photos were quickly debunked as fake. The ultimate reason why LRC did not try to make the story stick is the close proximity of Mamfe to Nigeria. Authorities in Nigeria challenged the veracity of Yaoundé’s claim that assailants came across the border from Nigeria to attack their soldier. Yaounde finally swallowed its tongue when it became clear that pushingbthe narrative was tantamount to accusing Nigeria of hosting, arming, abetting and supporting an armed insurrection. That is how Yaounde let its clumsy lie die.

Jakiri, though, is ideal. The border with Nigeria is further off. This time around, the base for the assailants would not be given as Nigeria. These would be presented as homegrown terrorists,m. Yaounde must have figured that it must make the narrative a little tighter and more marketable as propaganda. That is how come Yaounde is hanging an odious crime – the killing by self of one of theirs – on the necks of a peace-loving, non-violent people. Never mind how strange it would sound to investigators that the same people of Jakiri ran towards the GBHS of the town to try to stop fire from ravaging the school campus only to be driven back by tear gas fired by you-know-who, of course. No lie is too intimidating for Issa Tchiroma to tell with a straight face. The regime lives by lies.

Yaounde used this same old trick in 1955, charging the opposition UPC with the killing of colonial French officers and using the pretext of those deaths to launch the blind repression of the so-called “maquisard”. The regime tried it again during the ghost town campaigns of the 1990s, working hard but failing to pin the assasination of a political leader in Bamenda and the slaying of an SDO in Muyuka in 1992 on the leaders of the opposition SDF. The regime championed a wild wave of arson across the Northern Region in the immediate aftermath of staging a hold-up on the 1992 presidential election won by Ni John Fru Ndi.

The Biya colonial regime is tonight trying to break the spirit and bones of every young man in the land of the Warriors of Nso… The regime has determined that it is losing the war to keep Cameroon “one, and indivisible”. To win, Yaounde has resolved to break the unrelenting spirit of Ambazonians and their unwavering hope in restoration. Where else to start than in Jakiri? Where else to dare Ambazonians to cross their line in sand?

Nice try, La Republique, but you fail. As with Mamfe post October 1st, this attempt to hang a dead gendarme on the neck of Jakiri, will fail as well. Ambazonia shall be free! Aluta continua!

END