Cameroon in trouble?

Since the Limbe attacks many Cameroonians had begun having doubts about their safety. This other attack and hostage-taking would surely not be a moral booster…

By George Esunge Fominyen,

I often remember one of my lecturers at the department of journalism and mass communication of the University of Buea saying, if ever we heard that CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (chief international correspondent) was in Cameroon with a crew of reporters, we should consider that the country had collapsed. The class was about major news organisations and conflict/war reporting.
It was a humorous bit of learning but the message stuck.
That is why I suspect there is big trouble in the offing when news organisations like France 24 and BBC World Service start having top headlines on Cameroon. Especially if it is not about a plane crash but about “rebels” taking persons hostage and threatening to kill them if the government does not react within three days.

I had learnt from Reuters on 31 October 2008 that another ambush had occurred around the Bakassi peninsula. But it did not hit home until evening.
After a rugged day (training community radio staff and pouring concept notes), I settled to watch some international news via France 24. The first story was about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (that’s a regular beat I thought).

Next in line: Cameroon:

“Heavily-armed pirates swarmed aboard an oil industry support vessel working off the coast of Cameroon and kidnapped 10 crew members, including six Frenchmen, the French foreign ministry said Friday.
Following the pre-dawn attack, a man claiming to represent a rebel group opposed to Cameroon’s takeover of the Bakassi peninsula warned the hostages would be killed unless Cameroonian officials agreed to reopen the issue.”
Now, that is not usual story number two.
Of course had the story not included six Frenchmen, it might only have surfaced as a brief. Nevertheless, my country was on the news again and on an International news media.

In late September we had made it into the African and human interest parts of foreign news bulletins when a band of “pirates?” swooped into the coastal town of Limbe, attacked a couple of banks and disappeared in speed-boats, leaving one person dead on the night of the heist and another a few days later.

In early June 2008, a divisional officer (sous-prefet) and soldiers of the Cameroonian army were ambushed and killed in the Bakassi peninsula. An area that had got Cameroon on the good side of the news in August after its complete handover to Cameroon by Nigeria.
Unfortunately, that Bakassi now seems to be a cursed gift. I may be wrong, but I get the impression more Cameroonian soldiers have died there since the handover process began in August 2006 than when the conflict was at its hottest in the 1990s. Again it’s my perception of things and not Gospel.

For months, Cameroonian authorities have either characterised the recurrent attacks as the work of “unidentified assailants”, “armed pirates’” and so on. They have promised inquiries, reported retaliation, stayed quiet but nothing seems to be moving towards calm in the waters off the Rio del Rey.
Now that we have a group that has clearly identified itself and is posing acts that need immediate response from the government - what are the Yaounde authorities going to do?

Since the Limbe attacks many Cameroonians had begun having doubts about their safety. This other attack and hostage-taking would surely not be a morale booster. To compound things, highway brigands who were usually contained in the north attacked commuters at Ahala (entrance to Yaounde from Douala) on the night of 29-30 October 2008. One person was killed. It is the same night of the hostage taking around Bakassi.

Someone needs to act. Someone has to act. Right now. But who? And how?

2008 has been quite a year in terms of Cameroon’s appearances on the international news map.
The February riots hit the headlines and we even had glimpses of Cameroon on CNN international and The Economist penned an article on the country.
But chaos was not complete. Christiane Amanpour is yet to step foot on our soil with a crew of CNN reporters. Apart from that piece of reporting by CNN about Buruli ulcer in Cameroon that got the Cameroon diaspora raving mad, the country has kept those war reporting news agencies out of the triangle.

Authorities must now show their mettle if Cameroon wants to keep things that way. Free of Al Jazeera, France 24, BBC and their likes.