Editorial: Akwaya; Blight on national conscience.

“An appropriate military operation is being prepared to put an end to these violent acts of provocation against our populations in these....very isolated localities,” Minister Joseph Beti Assomo said.

Akwaya is not the only locality, especially in the North West and South West Regions, that exist in the nadir of underdevelopment and enclavement.

But its case is special and most glaring to the point that for an administrator in Manyu, for instance, to visit the Subdivision, he has to go through Nigeria, (thank God there are no visa requirements), then exit Nigerian territory before getting into Akwaya.

The Subdivision, which shares borders with three Nigerian states, is without electricity and is not accessible to the rest of the country by telephone. It does not receive radio and television signals of the government media and gets its information from the Nigerian media.

The common currency used in the Subdivision is the Nigerian naira, which residents use for all their commercial activities and only reluctantly accept the franc CFA.

All those humiliating factors make them more like Nigerians than Cameroonians, which may explain why enmeshed in such neglect by their own government, residents have been surviving on the mercies of neighbouring violent herdsmen and later the separatist fighters.

Last year, the Member of Parliament for Akwaya, Hon Aka Martin Tyoga, made a desperate plea to the government to set up a military base in the area. 

That, the lawmaker had insisted, was the first emergency needed to save his people from the hands of Fulani herdsmen from Nigeria.

Hon Aka had stressed that a new military base would benefit the population, especially as the lone military base in the area is 32 kilometres away from the theatre of operation of the herdsmen.

This was recently re-echoed by the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon, PCC, Rt Rev Dr Fonki Samuel Forba. Rt Rev Dr Fonki criticised the Cameroon government for abandoning the population of Akwaya Subdivision to themselves and at the mercy of sophisticatedly armed Nigerian Fulani herders to the point of almost ‘ceding’ it to a neighbouring country.

This time around, the government acted swiftly at a security high command meeting in Yaounde with focus also on preoccupying developments in Akwaya Subdivision. 

Minister Joseph Beti Assomo told the high command of the military and defence chiefs at the special security meeting that “vigilance remains necessary” in adverting atrocities such as that which was “recently recorded in the Messaga Eko1 canton, in the Akwaya Subdivision, Manyu Division, South West Region''.

Such atrocities in the administrative unit, the minister said, are “perpetrated by armed herders from a neighbouring country in search of pasture and water for their numerous livestock...An appropriate military operation is being prepared to put an end to these violent acts of provocation against our populations".

He then insisted that: “It is the State's duty to provide an appropriate response”.

The Guardian Post is enchanted that the minister understands it is the duty of the government to protect its citizens and their properties, a responsibility it has reneged for years in Akwaya.

But providing even another military base in the Subdivision will just be like using a thin plaster to cover a deep gash. It won't heal the wound.

What the Subdivision urgently needs is to be disenclaved, first with a road that links it with the rest of the country.

How does Yaounde, for instance, justify why the Senior Divisional Officer, SDO, of Manyu, has to go through Nigeria to visit an administrative unit under his jurisdiction?

What if Nigeria, for whatever reason, closes its borders as it does occasionally? Isn't it shameful that since independence, Yaounde has not been able to construct even a seasonal road to link Akwaya Subdivision the rest of Manyu?

If another military base is created in Akwaya, how can troops move from one point to the other when in the Subdivision, there are hardly any motorable roads to link one village to the other?

Akwaya will continue to be a stain on the conscience of the country's political class in Yaounde and the apex of Anglophone neglect as long as there is no direct road to get to a whole Subdivision from Cameroon!

The government has promised to solve the military and security problems, but that has to be accompanied by the provision of social amenities and infrastructure in a sensitive Subdivision, which is also being used by separatist fighters to smuggle some of the ammunition they use to rain havoc on innocent civilians in the NorthWest and South WestRegions.