Moïse Essoh | UPC-Manidem (Cameroon)
Comrades, activists of Pan-African and anti-imperialist causes who have come from the four corners of the planet to participate in and contribute to the advancement of our common struggles, in the name of the Union des Populations du Cameroon―Manifeste Nationale pour l’Instauration de la Démocratie, known in the colonial enclave of Cameroon as the UPC des Fidèles, and in the name of the people of Cameroon, I greet you.
It is with a deep determination to work for the liberation of the colonial enclave of Cameroon that we take part in this conference. But to speak of a colonial enclave is to project ourselves far into the past, when on a corner of a table, symbolically in Berlin, but also in many other European cities, a small group of men decided the political, economic, social and cultural fate of millions of Africans, by sharing out geographically on paper, territories of influence, violence, exploitation, cultural dispossession and denial of the Humanity of the African peoples. All this with the obvious aim of plundering these territories and concentrating wealth to the detriment of the greatest number. Even today, this paradigm has not changed.
Imperialism is more present than ever, with its embassies calling the shots politically in certain territories; with its economic exploitation agreements, misleadingly called Economic Partnership Agreements; with its multinationals unrestrainedly pumping Africa’s natural and human resources, organizing or benefiting from armed conflicts created to plunder these resources even more easily; with its media flooding African spaces with truncated analyses, neoliberal thinking and opinion manipulation.
I would now like to give you a brief summary of what this imperialism is doing in Cameroon today, through the corrupt and gerontocratic regime led by Mr. Paul Barthélemy Biya, 92 years old, in power for 42 years, very ill, and who returned to Cameroon last Monday after yet another long stay with his masters in France and Switzerland.
For those unfamiliar with Cameroon, the country was briefly a German protectorate from 1884, and on paper, a German colony from 1885. In 1922, in the aftermath of the first European war of the 20th century, Cameroon was placed under the mandate of the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN, and its administration was entrusted to France and Great Britain.
In 1948, pro-independence activists created the Union des Populations du Cameroon (abbreviated to UPC), which I represent here today, and, after a relentless struggle by the peoples of Cameroon, under the leadership of the UPC, forced French colonial power to grant independence to French-speaking Cameroon; but only a façade of independence, since the UPC, which had led the entire struggle, was banned in July 1955. And on January 1st, 1960, France entrusted power to one of its own men, Ahmadou Ahidjo, buried here in Senegal. For its part, Great Britain only granted independence to the English-speaking part in October 1961, contrary to the UPC’s demand that the two parts, separated in 1922, should first be reunited and then, with a common political project, conquer independence together.
The UPC did not give up, however, and continued the struggle on both the political and armed fronts. On both fronts, we were to lose tens of thousands of activists, both in political prisons and on the military front. Between 1958 and 1971, several of our leaders were assassinated, including Ruben Um Nyobé, Félix Moumié, Ernest Ouandié and Osende Afana.
But the UPC, still banned, resisted and patiently rebuilt itself underground for 35 years, notably by creating, in 1974, a political movement called Manifeste National pour l’Instauration de la Démocratie (MANIDEM).
In 1982, Mr. Ahidjo handed over power to the current president, Paul Biya. For the past 42 years, this man, backed by France, has officially ruled Cameroon.
What can you say about the situation in Cameroon today?
After more than 64 years of neo-colonial rule, Cameroon is now in the hands of multinationals, notably French. Cameroon’s main production is geared towards satisfying the needs of Western economies, with agricultural, forestry and mining raw materials, including oil.
The catastrophic management of the corrupt regime of the ruling CPDM party and its leader, Paul Biya, has led the country into a massive debt overhang, with unprecedented poverty for the population, despite the high level of education and qualification of Cameroon’s youth.
At the political level, the total absence of real democracy, and not just a façade of democracy where the electoral system is totally confiscated by the regime, means that all elections follow one another without any respect for the verdict of the ballot box. Any public protest against these electoral hold-ups is systematically suppressed by violence and political imprisonment. The absence of freedom of expression is equally glaring. The slightest protest is violently repressed. It is this lack of freedom of expression that has exacerbated a latent crisis between Cameroon’s English-speaking populations and the overwhelmingly French-speaking central state, and led the country’s English-speaking regions to an armed rebellion that, since 2016, has continued to bloody these populations, leaving more than a million internally displaced and tens of thousands of innocent civilian victims.
This violation of freedoms is even more barbaric at a time when we are witnessing the end of a regime. As recently as 3 weeks ago, a minister threatened public opinion, journalists and citizens with reprisals if they dared to debate or comment on the health of the 92-year-old dictator…! That’s how far we’ve come in Cameroon today.
However, the people have not completely given up. Recently, teachers launched a large-scale protest movement against their living and working conditions, where some have not been paid for 10, even 15 or 20 years. The movement was, of course, suppressed by the authorities. Young people regularly express their aspirations whenever they can, even if it always costs them a few jailings.
In all these citizen and popular mobilizations, the UPC-MANIDEM always tries to stand by the masses in struggle.
What can we say about UPC-MANIDEM?
UPC-MANIDEM has been fighting imperialism for over 76 years now. Knowing that the current regime in Cameroon is neo-colonial and allied with imperialism, the UPC-MANIDEM is still de facto banned in Cameroon. Indeed, since Cameroon’s return to a multiparty system in 1990, the UPC-MANIDEM, which was the only party to have resisted the one-party system since 1960, has yet to regain administrative recognition of its existence. Today in Cameroon, the UPC-MANIDEM still does not exist administratively, whereas more than 360 parties are legally recognized. And this despite the fact that our party won a case against the State before the Cameroon Supreme Court in 1993, and despite the fact that we won again, in 2016 before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, i.e. the African Union. But the Cameroonian government, on the instructions of the President of the Republic, has refused to implement these court decisions for 31 years. It must be said that the UPC-MANIDEM’s political project, updated to today’s circumstances, is still the same: to liberate Cameroon and Africa from neo-colonial and neo-liberal imperialism, to restore to the peoples of Cameroon and Africa their dignity and sovereignty, and to constantly raise their standard of living.
Since 1948, the UPC, whose Secretary General, Comrade Ruben Um Nyobé, was Vice-President of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, has theorized, practiced and inscribed in its political DNA the only organizational solution that can liberate Africa’s fragmented peoples, namely Pan-Africanism. Knowing that the peoples of Africa, and particularly of French-speaking Africa, share a common destiny of liberation because their economic and political predator is the same, namely the West and particularly imperialist France, the UPC-MANIDEM believes that only a fighting Pan-Africanism can create effective resistance against this globalized capitalism.
For UPC-MANIDEM, the balkanization of forces benefits capitalism. It locks us into identities that are inoperative in the face of the major challenges facing us. It is imperative that we re-establish another path, the path of Pan-Africanism in combat, at once theoretical, practical and, above all, political. Yes, we need to work together to redefine a global contemporary political project for Africa, one that makes each African territory, which we still call “country” in quotation marks, a space for the conquest of real sovereignty, unfailing solidarity and anti-capitalist redistribution of natural and produced wealth among the masses of the people, for the well-being of the greatest number.
Naturally, just as this Pan-African dimension of the struggle is essential for the liberation of African peoples, so too is convergence with all anti-imperialist forces worldwide. Just as the peoples of Africa have in common the liberation from neo-colonialism, the peoples of the world have in common the liberation from the diktat of imperialism in every corner of the globe. Whether in Asia, South America, Europe or the Middle East, capitalism shamelessly strikes, pauperizes, exploits and plunders wherever it can. We must not turn our backs on anti-colonial, social and sectoral struggles around the world. Faced with this monster of inhumanity and oligarchic accumulation, we will win together.
This is why, today, the UPC-MANIDEM is perfectly in tune with the aim of our Dakar conference, namely the necessary convergence between fighting pan-Africanism and the internationalization of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Down with neo-colonialism!
Down with capitalism!
Down with imperialism!
The struggle goes on!
Together, we will win!