Zero Vote Militants
At the rally to end the campaigns for SDF’s Fru Ndi in Yaoundé on October 9, 1992, the turn out was so frightening that the regime in power decided to send a killer to cause harm. He was nabbed and Ni John Fru Ndi was photographed brandishing the pistol in the midst of over 25,000 unprecedented crowd of militants. After Prime Minister Philemon Yang had rounded up his campaigns in Oku at the last Twin Elections , he was later to hurry back when word got to him that something had just happened! The National Chairman of the SDF had just passed by and the entire Oku had turned out on September 21, 2013. It was a crowd that will frighten even Herod! Philemon Yang had to gather all the millionaires of the North West Region like Shey Jones Yembe, Alhaji Baba Danpulo etc and returned to Bui and Donga Mantung. Their bags of money did the trick…they “neutralized” the crowd and what happened did happen!
What is snoopy here is not that the turn out at SDF rallies are often ten times or more compared to that at RDPC/CPDM rallies…but that over half of those are fanatics like the English hooligans who do more harm to the SDF than good. They are the very emotional ones who will readily go out to burn and loot even without any directives from party hierarchy. They know little or nothing of the party’s ideologies, the constitution or even the leadership at the base…except a certain Ni John Fru Ndi and the MP or Mayor of the area.
Statistics show that at campaign rallies of recent, SDF militants who make the greatest noises have no voters’ cards. Apart from the regime’s intentional disenfranchisement of youths between eighteen and twenty years, those of legal voting age who have the voter’s cards are less than 50%. This entails that if only potential SDF militants of voting age decide to go out and register, the SDF will win so widely that the rigging machinery has to be oiled by extra forces like the military and what Simon Achidi calls “Black Magic”!
Voter Apathy and Voter Fatigue?
After the 1992 stolen victory, and the aftermath of the 1997 electioneering imbroglio, many potential SDF voters have lost interest in any elections organized by the RDPC/CPDM regime. The psychological impact of this is very favorable to the ruling stratocracy headed by the ever sly and shrewd Machiavellian Paul Biya. He will come up with NEO 1; NEO 2 and then ELECAM1, and what next, just to change nomenclature and taxonomy while maintaining the status quo and his team in place.
Voters thus turn to feel very disengaged from the process, as they feel that they are just being used to “legitimize” the mafia . In fact, the Southern Cameroons National Council ( SCNC) has so succeeded in flaming this point to the extent that many West Cameroonians feel that participating at any elections “organized by La Republqiue du Cameroun” is like the ANC activists ( black South Africans) voting during the apartheid era for Pieta Botha and his gang of murderers! Far from it! Th situation in Cameroon has been engendered by the Biya Regime itself . The voter apathy in Cameroon is well organized by the Prince ( Biya) himself, for asCharles de Secondat ( Baron de Montesquieu )puts it “ The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not as dangerous to the common good as the apathy of the citizens in a democracy. Biya is very learned and has read widely. In fact, he has an avalanche of political philosophers and advisers of the highest grades around him…well paid! They study the political terrain and discuss this amongst themselves lengthily, and even put up scenes where some of them act various roles viz: Fru Ndi; the other opposition leaders; the hard core vs the gullible ones; the civil society; the fanatics and the militants. At the end of each act, they take down notes and make a final report to Mr. President, their employer who now throws a jibe at the people, tease them with it and see how they react, then he strikes! That is the Prince himself, Paul Biya!
Women Drifting off?
At the SDF primaries for Presidential nomination at the Carrefour de Quartre Morts, Cinema Le Paradis in Douala, Ni John Fru Ndi dedicated his political life to the woman. He has since been genuinely fighting to encourage the woman move up on the political ladder in Cameroon. Yet, after what has been going on, with the frightening and unprincipled attitude of very supposed responsible men, many women have decided to shrug their shoulders and say “ let’s leave politics to the dirty politicians.” This has accounted for very low women registering. In a recent publication , reports hold that according to voter’s statistics, as from May 2015, 99,446 people were registered out of which 60,858 are male while only 38,608 are female. Out of this figure, 72,513 are youths aged between 20 and 35, with 44,345 young men and just 28,168 young women.
While expressing his worries on the less concern attitude of women towards registration, Dr. Fonkam equally promised to calve out a strategy to attract more women towards this registration exercise in th next exercise.
What this entails is that if new rules and fresh impetus coupled with extra measures are not put in place, the majority of the women and young people, all of who make up over 70% of those who turn out at SDF rallies, will not vote in the coming elections!
What is worse is that these are they ones the RDPC can easily buy at the last minute to be given “extra voter’s cards” of ghost registered voters and asked to go and vote for CPDM, bring back the ballot papers of the SDF and be given a thousand francs each! There is need for very aggressive education …and above all, very serious mobilization and change of strategies to make use of this “unused giant” to whip off the RDPC when the time comes…and it will be sooner than later.
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
