The outspoken economist and statistician, Dieudonné Essomba, has publicly lambasted the Cameroonian government’s handling of the Anglophone crisis and has warned that Anglophones are going to separate from Cameroon if the Government insists on using violence to solve the crisis.
Speaking at Vision 4’s Club d’Elites programme, Dieudonné Essomba categorically said that the government at present does not have the economic, financial, political, and strategic means, among others, to fight the Ambazonia secessionist movement that has now brewed for four whole years.
The economist also blamed the armed conflict on the government’s stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to the Anglophones when the crisis began in 2016, and later on sending the military there mostly made of francophones.
“When we are in a unitary state and then you send the military to a zone like the Anglophone regions, that army appears exactly as an opposition to the people. In this case, you can’t see Anglophones whose children are in the bushes collaborating with these forces to kill the separatists. It is inconceivable,” he said
“Anglophones sitting in their region, with their children in the bushes, become faced with Beti’s, whom they don’t know, and Fulbe’s dressed in military attire, and we expect them to collaborate with them against their own people. How is that even possible?” He added.
Dieudonné Essomba maintained that the present unitary state has been an utter failure and must be revised if the government wants to save and maintain the unity of Cameroon.
“Anglophones are no longer with the Unitary State. They have absolutely no interest in it anymore. What the government has to do is sit together with them and propose an alternative system which to me should be at least a confederation. Africa has had four countries that were formerly federal states but abandoned: Ethiopia and Eritrea. Ethiopia abandoned the federal system, and Eritrea left. Same thing with Somaliland and Sudan. When a state leaves the Federal Union, the other states secede completely. The fourth one is Cameroon. If we are not careful, the Anglophones will go,” he said.
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