MR. JULIUS WAMEY: THE SAAVY CONTRACTOR

Julius Wamey – The postman, is a precursor of our modern-day internet warrior. One of the forerunners of the ongoing Anglophone revolution that has metamorphosed into a full-fledged quest for the restoration of our statehood is “The Postman”, Julius Wamey. I was an avid reader of his long running column in the “The Post Newspaper” during the 1990s. I still own a collection of his cherished column entitled “Collected Essays from The Postman-Where Heroes Go to Die” with a forward written by Dr. Simon Munzu.

In one hundred and ten pages, Mr. Wamey indicts the Biya’s Kleptocracy by revealing, in consummate details, the gradual and systematic erosion of the Anglo-Saxon way of life from 1961, to present. During the 1990s, Mr. Wamey, in a series of column in the widely read “Cameroon Post, inspired disenchanted university students who later left the country to seek greener pasture in the West. It is unfortunate that these students of the postman school of thought are the ones he now calls “internet warriors”. These are the students whose education have only served them as a pathway to the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea because the image that they had about what education provide could not be found in the dungeon called Cameroon.

It is paradoxical that Mr. Wamey who was deprived of a formal education per se (since he neither graduated from secondary nor high school) should be the one now equating education to going to school in a brick and mortal institution. Mr. Wamey is the example of one who acquired his education through an unquenchable desire to achieve. Those who know Julius, would attest to the fact that he was inseparable from his books, be it the most recent copy of Newsweek, Time Magazine or the Economists. Mr. Wamey is the quintessential auto- didact reputed for ravaging intellectual materials with reckless abandon without the guidance of teachers or any formal classroom education.

Influential auto didact include Leonado da Vinci, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison etc. So, it is possible that with passion, notwithstanding the circumstances, a committed individual can push the frontiers knowledge without a formal classroom education.

Education is a companion that no despot can enslave. That is why Southern Cameroonians are today, rejecting an educational system that school them to accept their second-class status. Mr. Wamey knows that. That is why he refused to accept the lies from CRTV and sought greener pasture in the West and eventually was recruited at the World Bank in Washington DC from where he has now retired as a consultant.

Those who know Julius Wamey in Washington, can attest to the fact that he could be excoriating the decadence of the World Bank and its failed poverty alleviation policies on a Friday evening, and comfortably dress up in his three-piece suit to go and serve that same World Bank that he was excoriating on a Friday evening, on a Monday morning. Mr. Wamey is a contractor. Just as the world bank can recruit him to promote policies that are lacerating the lives of Africans, he can still be contracted by his Bui kinsman, Philemon Yang, to support a policy that even Mr. Yang does not believe in. For the record, Mr. Yang lived in Canada as a High Commissioner and cherished the bilingual culture that prevails therein. Yet, he had the effrontery of claiming that in the Cameroonian context, bilingualism is not on the table.

Julius Wamey should know more than any one of us that, in the Anglo-Saxon system where the Magna Carter and the Habeas Corpus system prevails, a supreme court judge cannot be held for 200 days in inhuman condition, without being brought to a court of law, where his case would be adjudicated by a jury of his peers.

What I want Southern Cameroonians to retain from this write, even if they do not retain anything, is the fact that Mr. Wamey is a revolutionary, and a revolution is a fight to the death, between the past and the future. I want Southern Cameroonians to know that Mr. Wamey spent his years during the decades of the 1990s educating Southern Cameroonians for freedom and dignity through his column called the “The postman”. In subsequent edition, I would be quoting from “The Collected Essays” that Mr. Wamey graciously penned in the 1990s which contributed in creating the spark that has become the ravaging inferno in grass field.

I am befuddled by the gap in Mr. Wamey’s epistle. Is his write-up tailored within the prism of the terms of contract of his handler? When any critic analyzes a decrepit condition, he has a corresponding obligation to propose a viable alternative. Failure to do that is tantamount to escapism and may I humbly submit, that is what our brother is guilty of. Since Mr. Wamey spent a decade in the 1990s presenting us with a compelling case of the decadence of the Biya regime, he has a corresponding obligation to chart for us a clear course for the future. Merely condemning our initiative to interrupt a moribund educational system that leads from a university degree to riding a motorcycle on the street without even the obligation of wearing a protective helmet is tantamount to abdicating his responsibility as an educator.

Jude A Ozughen