Somebody, please, tell me I am dreaming. Tell me this is only an episode in a Nollywood movie. Tell me that this place being twirled around a bloke’s little finger is not the country I gave up juicy job offers to return to.
My rambling mind now goes back to 1979 in Lansing, Michigan.

“Red” Byrd, the crippled proprietor of WILS Radio could not believe I had just turned down his offer of what promised to be a key managerial position at the station. My reason: Cameroonians’ taxes had paid for my education in North America and I owed it to them to go back and contribute to the development of my country. There was a puzzling look on Byrd’s face when he heard me refer to Cameroon as “my country” with just as much pride as Americans refer to theirs.

“Africa sure needs young men like you”, he said. “I wish for you that this sacrifice would prove worthwhile”. The innuendo smacked of afro-pessimism – enough, in other circumstances, to put me on the war path. But I clung on to the olive branch, excusing him for what I thought was his ignorance.

I returned home bursting with zeal and fervor for my country, my head buzzing with development ideas I had gleaned from my stay out there which I knew must move this triangle forward. I came home from the land of Liberty to a country living in the shadow of a puffed-up intellectual midget who confiscated the right to think for the whole country. But my optimism for this land looked past Ahidjo’s antics, thanks, perhaps, to my Christian faith. And that optimism survived him.

But what do I see almost 30 years after that homecoming? The country snores on, unable, unwilling to wake from the bad dream. And how can I stop myself toggling from time-worn optimism to apathy, with what I see?
I hear a new Post Master has been placed in the Star post office, and that has added new batteries to the applause machine. But the applause does not drown such wry comments as, “Who cares? A postmaster writes no mail. He only stamps and sends what is brought to him”.

And in case some revelers in Oku (or Ngyenmbo) are tempted to say “sour grapes”, or to see me as a Nkwa killjoy who has developed green eyes because “chop” has moved upland, let me just say that those petty concerns are far beneath the Rambler’s orbit. Rather than claw each other’s eyes out over trotters, Ngwa and Mokake must together demand the half cow to which 1961 gave them joint title. That’s where I’ll stand till the cows come home.

By the way, do you remember the famous Radio Cameroon programme, “Tribute to Ahmadou Ahidjo”? Pa S.T. was asked if he did not feel like a priest who marries people everyday but himself remains celibate. His answer: I did not come here to sign my own death warrant.

Well following last week’s appointments I heard a similar question come from sources you could never have suspected. “He keeps changing others – what about himself?

Let me ask you this: When you go to the village and find that most of your age mates are dead; when you notice your bench mates and most of the people you shared lots of memories with are all gone, don’t you feel out of place? 

As the President replaces successive generations of ministers, supposedly because they have outlived their usefulness in their posts, how does he feel about himself? Is he a superman – made of different hardware and software that never wears out? Come on, folks, this is a big joke that’s gone flat. I imagine if you had asked Bongo a few months ago, he would still have told you he had the vitality to head Gabon for the next decade.

But some jokes make you want to cry. Just imagine that you hired a ganako to look after your cows. Someone comes out with information that this ganako has transferred some of your cows to his personal ranch in a distant place. I would have thought that the first logical reaction would be to count your cows and get the ganako to explain any discrepancies. In Cameroon, there is a rabble that is ever ready to take to the streets in defense of the ganako without asking him for an account of his stewardship.

There are two ways of understanding this kind of sycophancy: it is either the work of thieves who are covered by their closeness to the ganako and fear being indicted if he is, or the hypnotic power of the cultic presence that pervades this place. After all we never heard any reply to the Sun Temple’s charges some years back.
As for those safe havens where stolen.

But I believe that no cultic power can resist the Cross of Christ. So soldiers of the Cross, rise and march on to the fray. The battle for national redemption is far beyond political.

Meanwhile in what concerns the money, Cameroonians and indeed other Africans in like predicament are waiting and watching. The owners of the paddocks where the stolen cows are being fattened must decide who their real friends are – the thieving ganakos or the people who own the stolen cows. Can Sarkozy and Obama afford to let Africa down?

The Rambler