NEWS ANALYSIS: Major National Dialogue: a time for water not gasoline


Images of chopped off fingers and wrists, schools charring from fire, school children scampering away like rates, hands and faces bandaged with antiseptic gauze, heath centres and churches emptied by force, doctors and nurses take to their heels are the daily scenes the Northwest and Southwest regions in the last three years.



Forces of law and order ambushed, attacked and kidnapped, along hardworking individuals whose crimes, ostensibly is the fact that they have worked hard to make a life. Roads blocked, bridges destroyed and activities grounded and all these are for those lucky to not have been killed execution-style, after long hours of torture and demand for ransoms. This goriness, even if it is a movie, would have been too gratuitous for the audience. But, then again, it is happening in real life, in the Northwest and Southwest regions of our country, perpetuated by scattered armed groups, bent on establishing a new country even if that means creating a country with no humans, just ash.



Haven’t we lost enough? Why can’t we end the conflict now, must we wait for the next bus, when we can save lives now? The only solution is peace. Those who fled want to go back home and those who are at home want to stay. This is the only choice. We must sit and talk because after the violence; ending the rounds of guns in the Northwest and Southwest that have become an unending ‘boxing match’ is the right thing to do. If we talk frankly from Monday September 30, we will save the ones that were to die tomorrow. There is murder on a large scale in the two English-speaking regions.

Death counts keep growing in the two regions and this has shifted heavily from combatants to civilians. These numbers are overtaken by those injured. Our people are dying of treatable diseases in bushes because they cannot reach the hospital. Those traumatized and wondering without homes overshadow the number of those killed. In an unprecedented decision, President Paul Biya convened the Major National Dialogue wherein delegates are expected to propose solutions to fix the two troubled regions. This is an opportunity to change things through frank talk than unprovoked violence with spine-chilling fallouts.


Dialogue is for Anglophones to change the dynamics in the two regions. Delegates from the Northwest and Southwest live the pain of the gaping crisis in the two English-speaking regions. Those out of these regions are only affected. Cameroonians from the two regions living abroad (Diaspora) especially Anglophones despite their distance from home remain corded to the English-speaking regions in particular and Cameroon in general. However, it is deceitful to compare the agony of those living the crisis to those affected from a distance. Voices from the delegates in these two regions are preponderant. A fact, self-styled leaders of Anglophones living abroad must humbly accept.

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