In the last few weeks, Ambazonia separatist fighters and the forces of law and order and defense forces have been trying to outsmart each other with atrocities.
With Christmas around the corner, they have been multiplying tactics to milk money out of the population. While amba boys kidnap for ransom, state forces illegally arrest for ransom like is the case with the recent arrests in Molyko this Monday morning.
Those arrested by the police had their ID cards as required but because the police want money, they loaded law-abiding citizens into trucks and took them to unknown places where they will be intimidated and extorted.
Recently, Amba boys kidnapped a CAMWATER official in Bamenda and are demanding FCFA 10 million. That must be how they plan on raising money to get a lavished Christmas feast.
But our focus today is on the unending attacks on schools and markets.
This Monday, armed separatists are known to have exploded a local bomb at the OIC Market in Great Soppo, Buea.
They had earlier own exploded similar bombs at the University of Buea (UB) and carried out the killing of school children at a school in Ekondo Titi.
The victims and potential victims of the ambazonia independence war are so intricately linked that
what happens to me today is likely to happen to you tomorrow.
When those four children and one teacher of Government Bilingual High School, GBHS, Ekondo-Titi, were brutally killed by militiamen, chills went down the spines of well-meaning people, especially parents.
In the case of UB, the students were receiving lectures when these militiamen detonated a locally-made bomb. Some of the victims are still in hospital, others have undergone multiple brain surgeries as a result of the shock and stampede that followed the bomb at UB.
It is sad because those were harmless schoolchildren who could not comprehend the barbaric insanity and the enigma of the ongoing useless war of bloated egos.
There is a saying in most African societies that a child who belongs to one person is the one that is still in the mother’s womb.
This means that once born, the child becomes the collective upspring of society.
Thus, we at MMI were virtually devastated by the demonic indifference some social media jonahs exhibited towards the attack on UB and that on GBHS Ekondo Titi.
The agony of our disappointment was rudely driven home when one of them asked if the Ekondo- Titi school children were different from those that have been killed elsewhere in the two Regions.
Anglophones now justify killings and attacks on civilians. In the case of the attack on the OIC market, people say those at the market had failed to respect ghost town calls by ambazonia forces.
It is now clear how inhuman oafs some people have become because of the ambazonia war.
Does human life mean anything to anglophone warmongers? Would they attack UB or GBHS Ekondo Titi if their children or relatives were there? How bestial have we become?
Cameroon has become the proverbial he-goat that cannot hide its stink.
The state that has been preaching for effective schooling in the anglophone regions and for citizens to shun ghost town calls has failed to protect the people.
Colonial civil administrators have been scapegoating government teachers on claims that they have abandoned their jobs because of the fear of being killed by the separatist fighters who have been calling for a school boycott.
How can such teachers conquer fear when the State has not provided enough security for them? Instead of providing enough security, some administrators have continued to victimize many teachers in the two Regions by suspending their salaries.
They are creating more frustrations and destroying families by such callous acts. The irony is that the administrators, who threaten teachers every day, wear bullet-proof vests, move in the cordon of well-armed phalanxes of military guards, and are transported in armored cars. What else is witchcraft?
But while we fault the state for being unable to protect its people, the militiamen should leave soft targets and go to face their equals in arms.
One thing is clear: that the authors of these cowardly acts have murdered sleep. So, they too will have no sleep. There will be no hiding place for them, even if they escape from earth to seek refuge on another planet. Shedding the blood of innocent children and women carries the potency of suicide.
How killing schoolchildren and innocent civilians will yield independence is what we can’t understand. If all anglophones die, will Paul Biya end his life rule? Will Biya stop making love to his wife? Even after all the deaths in anglophone Cameroon, did you not see Biya celebrating his wife’s 51st birthday?
Let Anglophone come back to their senses and spare civilians the pain.
After such cowardly attacks by amba boys, it is the innocent population that is left at the mercy of the state forces. In all of these, the population suffers from several fronts.
I am UB, I am OIC, I am Ekondo Titi…
