CPDM baron spits fire!

·       Time to tell the bitter truth about Biya is now

·       Biya cannot continue to deceive Cameroonians

·       Biya kicked the ladder he used to climb to higher heights

·       Biya has buried my family and I alive

·       Biya must pay for all my property destroyed by the opposition in the 1990s

By Chinje Hope in Yaounde

President Paul Biya’s unpopularity is growing by the day. Many of those who were formerly on his side are now turning their backs on him and unveiling his can of worms. Yesterday it was the jailed former minister of territorial administration and decentralization, Marafa Hamidou Yaya. Today it is the turn of Pius Kango, once a baron of the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) party, who says he served as the president’s technical adviser in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In an open letter to the head of state, a copy of which was sent to our newsroom last week, Kango recounts the ordeal he has gone through simply because of what he calls his long years of “unalloyed and loyal support” for the CPDM and its president.

The open letter begins with food for thought which reads in part “The truth is bitter but it must be spoken”, Every thing that has a beginning must have an end”, “A man (Biya) can not continue to deceive the people all the time…”.

He says he was first living comfortably in Nigeria where he ran a popular dispensary and headed the community of Cameroonians in the country. In 1983 when, from Paris – France, President Biya made a clarion call to all Cameroonians living abroad to return home and help move the country forward, he thought it expedient to heed the president’s call.

Advice to Biya on how to tackle economic crisis

But even before he came back to the country, Kango drafted two detailed projects on how the economic crisis afflicting the country could be tackled and sent copies to the head of state in January 1989. He says his proposals were received by the former who acknowledged their receipt through a correspondence dated September 4, 1989 and signed by Edouard Akame Mfoumou, the minister of economy and finance at the time. The said correspondence, which was photocopied and attached to the open letter sent to our newsroom, was dispatched to Pius Kango in Nigeria via the post office.

Kango says he is in possession of 15 other letters praising him for his efforts in nation-building, which came from the president himself, the central committee of the CPDM, the former SG of the party, Njoh Mouelle, former ministers, Jean Baptiste Bascuda and François Sengat Kuo, etc.

Kango and family maltreated in the name of the CPDM

It was in 1990 that he finally chose to return to Cameroon, determined to actively participate in the development of the nation. But as he went around his North West province of origin preaching the doctrine of the CPDM and trying to mobilize the people, he was greatly manhandled by the restive population of Bui division who were all behind the opposition during the turbulent period of the reintroduction of multiparty politics in Cameroon.    

Not only was he molested during those years leading up to 1994, but his property including his school – the Saint Margaret Comprehensive College – were all destroyed. His wife, Winifred, was also kidnapped by those he says belonged to the “sadist opposition”. Kango says she later died in the hands of her kidnappers sometime in 1993.     

Biya insensitive to Kango’s plight

Thereafter, Kango continues in his open letter, “I…successively wrote ten letters to H. E. Paul Biya, respectfully requesting compensation for my (destroyed) property to enable me and my family to survive the hard times inflicted on us by the…opposition in Bui division, (but) the president…(has) failed to reply all the ten letters…”

For answer, he goes on, government instead expropriated his land in Dzeng in the North West and eventually built two schools, one secondary and one primary, on it. In addition, “my piece of farmland in Mbveh village from which I fed my huge family was seized from me and sold to the Presbyterian Church in Mbveh. And I have no money to sue the defaulters.”

Since then, Kango explains, life has become extremely unbearable for him and his family. He has since taken ill and his kids have dropped out of school, but there is no money for him to treat himself or enable the children to continue with their education.

More misery for Kango because of Biya

Pius Kango felt so despondent that he had to rush to Nigeria to seek financial assistance from his old friends and acquaintances out there. And he says he got quite some, amounting to 2.5 million FCFA. But on his way back to Cameroon, Nigerian immigration officials found a document in his bag in which he had written in praise of President Biya, mistook him for a Cameroon government agent who had come to spy on the Nigerian government, seized all his belongings, arrested him and detained him in Gembu (Nigeria) for 40 days! That was in 1994.

Kango gives the names of the Nigerian immigration officials who arrested him as Mallam Abakari, Mallam Abubakar, Mallam Balla, A. T. Gaya and Muhammed Gambo. On return again to the country, all his complaints to the government met deaf ears. This only inflamed his anger the more as he cries out that he and his family “have been badly kicked below the belt by the…government…”

Pius Kango further indicts President Biya, saying: “I ran the race with you from the beginning…and when we won the battle and you rose to national and international fame, you kicked the ladder which you used to climb to those heights…” He questions where those “saints” and “angels” who are now enjoying with the president were when they were struggling to make the Etoudi tenant what he is today.

The aggrieved CPDM stalwart ends up calling on the head of state to compensate him, as a matter of obligation and urgency, for all the intractable problems he has encountered as he struggled to fly the flag of the ruling party and help move the country forward.