The Common Law Lawyers strike going on for a month now has generated so much support that various sectors within Anglophone Cameroon are gradually coming on board. Otto Akama, from the tech community in Cameroon basically known as the Silicon Mountain with headquarters in Buea has added their voice. This is contained in a short memo sent by Mr. Otto Akama to BaretaNews. He wrote:
Guys let us stay positive. Everyone’s positivity counts.
The Anglophone community has been deeply disrespected in a series of steps. In order to succeed, a lot of leadership is needed.
It’s neither about the lawyers nor teachers. It’s about us all and for those who think it’s an Anglophone problem, remember that it is the same way the youth community is being toasted around and it is the same way the black community in America is being toasted around.
The real thing we are doing here is to build a culture of standing up tall when we feel oppressed and also standing up for others.
It’s not an issue of single instances, the fear of the police or the fear that we will not win. It’s an attitude issue. Not standing up is called cowardice.
For the fight, let’s do it for our brothers and sisters. There’s no guarantee of success. But not trying is a failure. However, the real battle is the battle within. Each time we shy away from a fight, the coward in us grows bigger, and it begins to reflect the quality of our lives. Cowardice never hides. Let’s be brave. If we lose in bravery, we will become stronger.
If you don’t fight against oppression, there’s no other way, you will depreciate, run away from your country, beg for jobs, beg for justice and grow old in that way.
Now, even if you shy away and the fighters succeed. After the struggle, winners share opportunities, but cowards just change the person they were begging from. It is your place to choose what you want to be. If you don’t want to fight, just stay. Begging is not that bad. It might just suit you. We all must stand up
1 comment
Anglophone Cameroonians’ Synergy
All Anglophone Cameroonians wherever they may be, should for no reason whatsoever, succumb to their gross injustice and their overshadowing discrimination, marginalisation, assimilation and subjugation by Francophone Cameroonians occupying 96% of the top-ranking positions in the country ranging from Ministers to Directors, and Heads of Corporations to Chiefs of Services. This is that divine-appointed moment for us to put our previous observations, findings, analyses and hypotheses together into a final conclusion – that for more than half a century, we have been a degraded, dejected and depleted people. That we have been a people with no voice, no rights, no dignity and no future – missing in the abyss of a grinding mill called our country.
If in the midst of these crucial circumstances, a great people with a common cultural and linguistic heritage are thus treated with broad daylight malignance, resentfulness, partiality and bias, if they are thus regarded as third class citizens and not given equal opportunities in all the sectors of the economy, of the judiciary and along the artistic and educational boulevard, then, they are therefore being reminded (either verbally or non-verbally) that they have been at the beck and call of a country to which they don’t belong by right of birth and of inheritance. They are thus being reminded; intrinsically, that they should form their own country because their supposed managers are either incompetent to manage them, or they are tired of mismanaging them.
In what fatigable enterprise does it consist in forming a country? Nothing too demanding to frighten the cavalcade of classically learned Anglophone Cameroonians resident at home and in the diaspora. Just a Constitution which can be written in a fortnight. What else? The land is there in its bounty richness and vastness. The human and natural resources are there like aquatic life in the Atlantic Ocean. Anglophone Cameroonians count among the most renowned and influential African intellectuals of all time. Professor Bernard Nso-Kika Fonlon and Professor Anoma Ngu Victor of blessed memories were scholarly icons of astounding celebrity to reckon with. Someone or some people somewhere putting on pseudo-academic gabardines should not make the regrettable mistake of their lives to treat Anglophone Cameroonians like stark illiterates who don’t know who they are, where they come from, and where they are going. This, above any crime ever committed against humanity, should not touch Anglophone Cameroonians. Worst of all, it should not touch me. Else, I will take it as a personal assault. And deal with it unswervingly, unwaveringly, unamicably, and unpardonably.
Nkwetatang Sampson Nguekie
Pupil of Plato,
Pen Fellow of the Magnolian Academy.