DEMOCRACY THE TIME OF CHANGE

With senators at last taking their seats, a globetrotting president vaunting his country’s opportunities to foreign investors, and major telecommunications, mining, energy and transport projects moving forward, are the dynamics of emergence sweeping Cameroon?

“The whole country has its answering machine on,” people from Ebolowa to Kousséri joked in early April. What earth-shattering event (apart from the Africa Football Cup, in which the Lions would be finalists) could have kept Cameroonians at the edge of their seats like that? The Senate elections. The 1996 Constitution called for an upper house of parliament whose president, in the event of a power vacuum, would serve as head of State until the next election, but the chamber never came into being a failure that the international community repeatedly decried as the country’s deepest democratic flaw. During his speech to the nation on 31 December, Paul Biya announced at last that the long-awaited Senate elections would take place; Cameroonians went to the polls on 14 April.

Today they have a new institution, where the Rassemblement démocratique du peuple camerounais (Democratic Assembly of the Cameroonian People, RDPC), the ruling party, has the majority. A year and a half after winning election to a sixth term, the President, say most of his constituents at the Etoudi Palace, is fulfilling his campaign slogan concerning “major projects” and not just those involving infrastructure and the economy. This is the year of elections and compliance with the Constitution. After the senators take their seats, it will be the Constitutional Council members’ turn. Then, municipal and legislative elections will take place, with the effective implementation of biometrics and the updating of voter registration rolls. All of this has triggered political jousting and elbow-shoving in the RDPC that the thriving private press has been gleefully covering since early in the year, shaking up the power barons with bold headlines.

SEVERAL GOOD SIGNS

During the traditional 20 May Unity Day parade in the capital of seven hills and the lavish banquet at the palace that will follow, it should be possible to gauge Cameroon’s progress. Despite some scepticism, several good signs appeared in the country earlier this year. President Biya, not one for hopping on a plane to sweet talk foreign investors, took two useful trips to France and Turkey in a groundbreaking new role.

The idea is to finally fulfil the legendary “potential” people have been talking about for decades. “I’m going to choke the next person who says Cameroon has potential!” a minister told the local press two years ago. “Let’s get down to business and make the most of it, for heaven’s sake!” In a completely different vein, on 19 April President Biya, a skilful negotiator, quietly worked behind the scenes to obtain the release of seven French tourists who had been abducted in Waza and held hostage in neighbouring Nigeria, resolving the crisis two months to the day after it broke. Considering the thorny relations between the two countries, soured for years by a conflict over the Bakassi border area, nobody thought the dénouement would come in large part from Yaoundé.

BIG PROJECTS

As a backdrop to these positive signs of openness, “big projects” are taking shape. Capitalising on major investments, construction on gas plants, dams and the Kribi agro-industrial complex is moving ahead at a brisk pace, boosting local businesses and creating jobs. Underground resources are being exploited. New or rehabilitated roads have brought some regions, such as the East, out of isolation and stimulated commercial exchanges. Rail transport and telecommunications have undergone modernisation, with new locomotives for Camrail and an additional license granted to Vietnam’s Viettel as well as work on the fibre optic network.

In the corridors of power, these strides are a cause for satisfaction and a reason to believe in Cameroon’s emergence. But the upbeat mood sometimes causes people to lose sight of other issues, such as the urgent need for training to fill the energy, mining and telecoms jobs of tomorrow. These fields with a future will require local human resources. Foreign companies active in Cameroon integrate technology transfer into their schedules of specifications, but concrete or sufficiently satisfying results do not always follow.

The challenge of the big projects is to create wealth while ensuring better living conditions development in the broadest sense of the term. In early 2013 Cameroonians, eyeing construction sites and listening to promises of change, seemed more confident than ever. Hopefully, President Biya’s results will live up to their expectations.

By Emmanuelle PONTIÉ