The Yaoundé initiative that was designed to resolve the crisis in Southern Cameroons, officially known as the Grand National Dialogue, is now, for all practical purposes, dead. Just like the Tripartite in the days of the late Ni John Fru Ndi and the SDF, this deal is no more. It has gone to meet its maker. This is a former deal.

To be sure, the undertaker, significantly, was none other than the senile character currently impersonating as father of the Cameroonian nation.

His name may be Paul Biya, but the 90-year-old Francophone dictator is in fact a combination of different things whose only job is mimicking the words whispered to his earpiece by his young and inexperienced wife Chantal Biya.

Biya’s acolytes say the Grand National Dialogue deal is dead and gone with Cardinal Tumi but Yaoundé is not willing to announce it!  

When he was relatively less senile in the 90s, on his campaign trail, Biya promised that he would personally supervise the construction of the Bamenda ring road.

But the prominent and successful failure has played the spoiler role to perfection and today Cameroon is in chaos.

Now with the numerous coups in Francophone Africa, it is evidently clear that only an intense and productive discussion with the NERA 10 headed by President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe will guarantee peace and prosperity in the Sub Saharan geopolitical chessboard. Russia’s Wagner has reduced France in Africa to an outsize satrapy.

Correspondingly, Dion Ngute’s recent trip to Buea is simply La Republique playing for time before coming up with renewed mischief. Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, Minister-Secretary General at the presidency himself has revealed, on record, that the Grand National Dialogue in Yaoundé was nothing but a gigantic farce.

The Ambazonia Interim Government though never fell into the trap. President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and Vice President Dabney Yerima saw through it from the start: never trust La Republique du Cameroun.

Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his deputy Dabney Yerima intuitively knew that no one deep within the Francophone dominated government in Yaoundé would respect the outcome of the Grand National Dialogue.

Biya and his gang have never made an effort to implement anything positive that came out of the Grand National Dialogue.  The unspoken mantra was to keep the Ambazonia Interim Government down.  

If Biya and his Francophone Beti Ewondo government were really interested from the start in achieving peace with the people of Southern Cameroons, the straightforward path would have been to ditch the current fake unitary system of government and go for federalism.

Instead, they have been using their corrupt pro Yaoundé Southern Cameroons political elites to demand more troops’ deployment to Ambazonia and making a mockery of the Canadian peace initiative.

Ngute’s latest trip to Buea without any Francophone CPDM baron in his delegation is an indication that the Grand National Dialogue is not a priority anymore.

Hence the Blame Ambazonia Game reaching a fever pitch all over in La Republique du Cameroun: Amba Boys are killing innocent people, Amba Boys are involved in kidnapping and extortion and Amba Boys are responsible for the suffering in Southern Cameroons. 

At least now it’s in the open: the only thing that matters for the Biya regime is to dish-out bribes to weak Southern Cameroons leaders and fighters and also to bribe as many traditional rulers as possible forcing them to denounce the Ambazonia uprising.

Nobody will miss the Grand National Dialogue. But what we of the Cameroon Concord News Group want the people of Southern Cameroons to take home is that the decaying Biya regime is an eminently untrustworthy entity.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

For over two years now, western media and human rights organizations have alluded without convincing evidence that the continuous hosting of entertainment and sporting events in Saudi Arabia is an attempt by the Kingdom to “sportswash” its negative human rights reputation.

While these unproven allegations are being made in the West about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a man in Buea, Cameroon, with a questionable character, has been engaged full-throttle in “imagewash“.

This man is Rev Fonki Samuel Forba, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon who has been burning through money like wild fire.

Rev Fonki has been the moderator of the PCC since 2014 and has just over a year left in his official tenure, and his job description designates him as the spiritual leader of the institution he presides over.

The consensus among PCC Christians is that he has wrecked the church by robbing the institution’s finances with no limits and possesses no fear of God.

He has been accused by those close to him of possessing no iota of spirituality, and he has appointed, without justification, his henchmen to positions they are ill-equipped for.

Cameroon is a country not renowned for keeping statistics on anything. Still, a recent survey of PCC members in the Northwest and Southwest regions of the country returned that the moderator has an approval rating of 9.3%. Even in Akwaya, where he says he comes from, his approval rating was 16.9%.

With such dismal approval ratings, Rev Fonki is working hard to restore respectability to his battered image before he exits the stage next year.

A recent video which went viral on social media with Rev Fonki dancing and spraying cash around like a Nigerian scammer in a Lagos nightclub did not help him.

So, last week, the ‘chief scammer of Buea’ arranged with some like-minded crooks in a mushroom institution which has distinguished itself for shady academic quality to confer on him an honorary PhD.

The Protestant University of Central Africa in Yaoundé is one of Cameroon’s many institutions of higher learning, with lecturers and administrators who know little about academics, honesty, spirituality and humility.

This institution has never had a credible reputation, and it surprises no one with brains that they followed Rev Fonki’s wish to grant him his questionable degree.

The Reverend brought a few clowns to the sham ceremony dressed in Manyu traditional regalia claiming to be notables from Akwaya—a sad joke of a spectacle.

Watching a short clip of the charade unfold on Facebook invokes rage and many other strong emotions.

Apologists for Rev Fonki are now forwarding the video of the shameful commemoration stating that he is now an academic and honorary doctor.

No amount of “imagewash” by a man with no integrity and academic standing will change the facts.

In biblical days, Rev Fonki would have been sentenced by the highest court of the land to death by stoning and would have earned it for his contribution to wrecking the PCC, using exaggerated thievery as a weapon.

Today, people are required to address him as Rev Dr Fonki Samuel Forba. The world has changed for the worse. The “imagewash” Gospel, according to Rev Fonki, is here.Hallelujah!!

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

This year, precisely from the 20th to 22^nd of October 2023, SOBA UK will bring the world together again at Celtic Manor Resort , Newport in Wales.

SOBA UK’s innovation theme has been revealed to both Cameroon Intelligence Report and the Cameroon Concord News.

“Empowering for Success: Unlocking the potential of the boy child” is the theme that will be executed by renowned academics and business leaders. Cameroon Concord News Group is proud to have been invited for this event.

Each year, SOBA UK creates immersive experiences where guests feel like members in the UK House of Lords!!  This particular year, guests will feel like Royals!!

We of the Cameroon Concord News Group understand that the exquisite Celtic Manor Resort, nestled amidst the enchanting Coldra Wood in Newport is a model that engages your senses, surprises you throughout the convention, excites you to interact with hands-on activities, and takes down barriers so guests feel comfortable to network with everyone at the event.

As Chairman and Editor-In-Chief of the Concord Group, I have requested our London Bureau to visit the Celtic Manor Resort!! We’ll give you a hint after the visit!!

To this I put my name:

Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

The Russia-Africa summit held in St. Petersburg received considerable attention in the past week as Moscow sought to win hearts and minds on the African continent.

Anti-Western rhetoric, unsurprisingly, featured heavily in the key narratives. Only 17 African leaders attended this session compared with 43 at the 2019 summit in Sochi, a fact Russian presidential adviser Yuri Ushakov claimed was due to Western pressure on leaders to decline the invitation.

The central discourse in much Russian-state media has been the Western colonial past in African countries, and its damaging legacy, which has been set against Russian attempts to build a multipolar and thus more equal world system, with African countries as real partners.

Steve Rosenberg of BBC News, in his analysis ahead of the summit, reviewed Russian newspapers, including Izvestia, a fiercely pro-Kremlin broadsheet that published an opinion piece by Petr Tolstoi, the deputy Duma chairman, claiming “Western countries can’t seem to cure themselves of their colonial mentality which has developed over centuries.” Rosenberg concluded that one should “expect to hear Russian officials making this accusation a lot over the next two days because they know it plays well in parts of Africa.”

The concept of equal multipolarity is supported by many African leaders. In his opening remarks to the summit, Azali Assoumani, president of Comoros and head of the African Union, said: “The multipolar world of the 21st century cannot close on itself. That is why Africa wants to have a fair and mutually beneficial partnership with the whole world. It is obvious to us that Russia has a special place in partnership with us, and we are ready to work all over the world.”

If this means a reduced partnership with the West, what can Russia offer Africa? Moscow aims to build relations that either carry importance for the whole continent, at a bilateral level, or at a multinational level through organizations, such as the African Union. Food security is paramount for all of Africa, especially after Russia ended its participation in the Black Sea grain deal. The Russian government’s decision to offer free grain to six countries — Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic and Eritrea — is a strategic move to win hearts and minds on the continent.

At a bilateral level, technology needs were among the strategic collaborations discussed. For example, Russia is ready to share with Africa its developed technologies in the field of extraction and sale of precious metals, according to Yulia Goncharenko, director of the Department of State Regulation of the Precious Metals and Precious Stones Industry of the Ministry of Finance.

Russia is also interested in further cooperation with African countries in the energy sector. Over many years, Soviet and Russian specialists have designed and built large energy centers in Angola, Egypt, Ethiopia and other countries on the continent, with a total capacity of 4.6 gigawatts, a quarter of Africa’s hydropower capacity. More than 30 promising energy projects with Russian participation in 16 African states are now in varying stages of development. Russian companies Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil and Zarubezhneft have been engaged in the development of oil and gas fields in Algeria, Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo.

“Moscow aims to build relations that either carry importance for the whole continent, at a bilateral level, or at a multinational level through organizations, such as the African Union.” Dr. Diana Galeeva

The impact of the Ukraine war also brings Russia closer to Africa in several economic and financial fields. Among the key discussions at the summit was the use of national currencies in trade deals, including the Russian ruble. In this regard, the New Development Bank, formerly known as the Brics Development Bank — which now includes Egypt, Bangladesh and the UAE, as well as regional development banks — supports the development initiatives of developing countries on all continents. Agreements have been made on the use of national currencies in trade transactions. “This is a strategic tool in finding a balance of power, and building a more just world and a new multipolar and multilateral world order,” Dilma Rousseff, the former Brazilian president and current head of the New Development Bank, said.

Another strategic direction shaped by geopolitics is Russia’s engagement in the reorientation of transport and logistics flows toward the states of the global south, including Africa. The International North-South Transport Corridor aims to provide access to areas ranging from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean, allowing Russian goods to reach Africa by the shortest sea route. Naturally, this corridor can also be used to supply African goods to the Russian market.

Finally, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was spotted at the summit, which brings into view the question of security and Russia-Africa military relations. Before the summit, the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented that “Wagner’s chief spheres of influence outside Syria and Ukraine are Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mali,” and added that “Wagner’s military resources in Africa are considerable.”

The Russian ambassador to the Central African Republic told the Russian state-owned domestic news agency RIA Novosti that 1,890 “Russian instructors” are supporting government troops in the civil war there, and added that it is thought that there are up to 1,200 mercenaries in Libya, while in Mali, the anti-Western junta has brought in several hundred Wagner fighters. The paper predicts that Wagner will focus now on Sudan, which “will play an important role in Russia’s new Africa strategy. If Prigozhin and his fighters can achieve success on this front, their next may be Eritrea.” This might bring broader predictions of Russia’s growing military role in Africa.

Overall, the message from the summit was “From Russia with Love,” showing a Russia intent on a more equal and cooperative world compared with the persistent inequalities of Western relations. President Vladimir Putin’s warm welcoming of African leaders indicates how Russia is reshuffling its traditional allies, and clearly the African continent has highly strategic importance for Moscow in many fields. This policy will continue in at least the short and medium term, with instant impact gestures mixed with longer-term investment and interdependency. Much of the African continent seems to be happily accepting this message, allowing their hearts and minds to be swayed through the possibilities of economics, politics, military, and other geopolitical and strategic considerations.

Source: Arab News

He went to Russia to beg as usual, using the Russia-Africa Summit as an excuse or a pretext, but Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya, also known as the Lion man, will be leaving the Russian capital, Moscow, with a bloodshot eye.

Russia may be in need of allies but it does not have money to give to irresponsible governments like the Yaoundé government which has been on a begging spree for decades.

Russia has already forgiven some of the continent’s debt but this does not imply it has money to distribute to African leaders who have clearly demonstrated that their relationship with money is causing death and destruction in their countries.

The Yaoundé government, led by the country’s collapsing president, Paul Biya, is an example of a government which cannot use in a responsible manner, any money given to it by its allies and international organizations.

If Mr. Biya will have anything of import, it might be assurances from the “Russian Czar” that it would not overthrow the corrupt and moribund Yaounde government which has been in power for over four decades and has nothing to show for its existence.

Russia has been the brain behind the anti-French sentiments across West Africa and these sentiments are resulting in the overthrow of pro-French and incompetent leaders in French-speaking West African countries, with Mohammed Bazoum of Niger Republic being the latest victim.

For some years now, Yaoundé has been the target of Wagner Group forces and this has rattled the beleaguered Yaoundé government which has been weakened by corruption, Boko Haram and Ambazonian fighters who are regrouping to finally take back their beloved Southern Cameroons.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

President Biya’s end is very near and his fall will be sudden, swift and bloodless. It is more than a month ever since the 90-year-old travelled to France from where he reportedly fired General Ngambou Esaïe after the soldier man warned Minister Paul Atanga Nji that he was walking on broken bottles.

We of the Concord Group can now reveal that a new president is in the making. In the nation’s capital Yaoundé, Biya’s acolytes both within his ruling CPDM party and the military are claiming that he is still in charge and that it is business as usual.

But there is still much they in Yaoundé don’t know. And one of such is simply that, you cannot remain head of state forever!

There are under-the-table talks that the army may intervened due to the sacking of General Ngambou Esaïe which is widely seen as clearing the way for Franck Biya, President Biya’s eldest son to succeed the father.

Cameroon Intelligence Report understands Biya and his men are in Geneva planning a massive purge deep within the ruling CPDM party with prominent CPDM barons being targeted.

According to Cameroon Intelligence Report sources, plans are being made to arrest top figures both in government and in the military.

Where is Paul Biya?

Mr Biya has been conspicuously absent since he travelled to France a month ago. The 90-year-old president is now at the mercy of his young and foolish wife who is keeping him under guard at the InterContinental Hotel in Geneva. He only reads prepared statements and talk to cabinet ministers who speak his native tongue.

But he has not been seen by the Cameroonian people since his recent trip to France. So, who actually fired General Ngambou?

It is clear that Chantal Biya and her relations are now in charge of state affairs in a country that is disintegrating! The ruling CPDM party should disown Biya and if they do—- A new president is indeed in the making

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

A dossier of bank slips detailing suspect payments of millions of dollars handed to the journalist brought the downfall of a political upstart in Cameroon. But it also led to Zogo’s murder. His colleagues went to investigate why:

Martinez Zogo was 50 when his body was found on an empty plot of land in Ebogo, Yaoundé, Cameroon, on 22 January 2023. He had left his radio station, Amplitude FM, at about 8pm on 17 January. People saw a group of men in a black Toyota Prado follow his car. So, apparently, did Zogo, as he drove quickly to a nearby police station.

But the gate was closed, his car was jammed in by the Prado, and the journalist was spirited away. Five days later, his naked corpse was found dumped on the outskirts of the capital. According to Amplitude FM’s editor-in-chief, Charlie Tchouémou, who identified the body, Zogo’s body had a broken right foot, multiple severed fingers and a twisted tongue.

Cameroonian police arrested the alleged mastermind of the killing: the Gucci-suited media tycoon Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, owner of the television channel Vision4 TV and the newspaper L’Anecdote.

There was a confession – by an alleged accomplice, a police lieutenant colonel called Justin Danwe – and a motive.

Belinga would have been angered by the journalist, whose full name was Arsène Salomon Mbani Zogo, and who had, in the week before his abduction, forcefully accused him on air of large-scale corruption. When Zogo’s remains surfaced five days after his kidnapping, the police concluded that this had been Belinga’s revenge.

A detailed statement that they claim was made by Danwe, the deputy director of Cameroon’s General Directorate for External Investigations (DGRE), which has been widely circulated in Cameroon, appears to leave no room for any other conclusion. Danwe confessed to leading the assailants, saying Belinga had paid him and others $60,000 (£47,000), and took part in the beating, which, Danwe said, took place on a construction site belonging to Belinga.

Danwe also incriminated Belinga’s friend Laurent Esso, the justice minister, who he said was phoned during the beating and asked: “What else they should do?” Danwe claims Esso responded that they should “finish the job”. According to the police, Danwe also said that his boss, the DGRE chief, Léopold Maxime Eko Eko, was involved and that the black Toyota Prado was Eko Eko’s. On Danwe’s statement alone, police went on to arrest close to 30 other men he claimed were involved.

Police told Reporters Without Borders (RSF) that “an examination of the phones of the suspects has confirmed that calls were made between Belinga and Danwe, and between Belinga and justice minister Laurent Esso, on the evening of the murder”.

The RSF report says that the “volume of evidence” means a reconstruction of the murder “no longer seems to be a priority for the [police] investigators”. Which means Cameroonians do not know precisely what happened between the day of Zogo’s abduction and the discovery of his body – let alone what the role was of all 30 men allegedly involved in the killing of one journalist, and how many might have fitted in the Toyota Prado.

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We, Zogo’s colleagues from the Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors (Naire), were concerned that the explanation for our friend’s brutal killing seemed too simple. Naire launched an “Arizona Project” – a model dating back to 1976, when journalists from all over the US came together in Arizona to finish an investigation that the reporter Don Bolles had been working on when he was murdered by members of an organised crime group. The “Arizona” motto is: you can kill a journalist, but you cannot kill the story.

A team of Naire members – David Dembélé from Mali, Selay Kouassi from Ivory Coast and Bram Posthumus, a Dutch national who lives in Abidjan, Ivory Coast – landed in the Cameroonian capital, Yaoundé, on 12 April 2023 to find out if Zogo’s exposure of corruption had led to his murder.

The ageing autocrat Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon since 1982. There was suspicion that the political vultures circling around Biya may have set up the story that killed Zogo to rid themselves of a competitor.

Belinga had enjoyed an astronomical rise in politics. It had been noted that Belinga’s wife compared herself to the first lady, Chantal Biya, known for her flamboyant red wigs. “At least my hair is natural,” Mrs Belinga had said at a public ceremony at an orphanage only weeks earlier.

Before 1995, few in Cameroon knew much about Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga. From a farming background, he was born in 1965 in Cameroon’s central region, and moved to Yaoundé as a young man. He found a job at a newspaper, where he was mentored by its editor, Gilbert Baongla. Baongla openly called himself the (extramarital) son of Paul Biya – without ever being officially contradicted.

Belinga learned how to make influential friends. Stories abound about his tactics, such as how he could even imitate the voice of the president on the phone.

By the time Belinga started his own newspaper, L’Anecdote, in 1995, he had served a prison term for extortion of the then-director general of the National Water Corporation, Clément Obouh Fégué. In 2006, he caused uproar with the publication in L’Anecdote of a list of 50 alleged “homosexuals” in Cameroon that included ministers, heads of state corporations, clergymen and media celebrities.

It almost caused a cabinet reshuffle, as conservative public opinion demanded that ministers be “flushed out”. But soon all went quiet. Senior officials threatened court action against Belinga but did not follow through, apart from the labour minister, Grégoire Owona, who won his defamation case and saw Belinga jailed for four months.

Belinga’s business empire expanded to include finance, property, education and public works. “And it’s all because of blackmail,” a close relation of Belinga claimed to a ZAM magazine reporter. “The list of 50 contained only those individuals who refused to give him money. He continues to blackmail [a lot of people] in this way.”

Zogo would certainly have annoyed Belinga, that much is clear. On his live show, Zogo had repeatedly said that he had a dossier on the man. This dossier was allegedly full of bank slips, payment instructions and tables of sums amounting to tens of millions of dollars, printed out by what appeared to be government office printers.

Zogo had gone into detail, listing alleged payments to Belinga from state coffers to the equivalent of $79m over 10 years. “I have the proof,” he told listeners. “I already sent it to the president.”

Known as a Biya supporter, Zogo believed the president to be above corruption.

There are so many corruption cases. But Zogo talked only about Belinga. Why?

Cameroonian journalist

But the arrest of the journalist’s alleged murderer has provided scant relief to civil society. Wherever Naire reporters go, the fear and silence are suffocating. People – from anti-corruption groups to lawyers, parliamentarians and fellow journalists – are not answering their phones. Or they promise a meeting and then don’t show up. Or are just very cagey indeed.

Two subjects seem taboo: any investigations into corruption involving anyone besides Belinga; and the succession of Biya.

There are whispers: Belinga was a rival to other players in the palace power wars. Factions are fighting for access to the throne and the state coffers, positioning for the moment the president dies. Belinga’s arrest has removed one important rival.

The fear is infectious. Two other journalists have been killed in Cameroon since the Zogo murder and the Naire team’s hotel – the Kremlin, named because the “owner is a great fan of Vladimir Putin”, a staff member says – seems well suited for interviews with worried people who mostly talk in vague allusions.

Hundreds of propaganda outlets are financed by political factions in the country, but there are those who question the official narrative around Zogo’s death.

“There are so many corruption cases,” says one journalist who reports from Cameroon for French media. “But Zogo talked only about Belinga. Why?” He talks of Zogo’s dossier being “full of proof”.

“Why a whole dossier only about Belinga?” the journalist asked.

Naire has seen Zogo’s dossier. It is impressive, featuring apparently genuine government bank transaction printouts, Excel spreadsheets of payments from government budget heads to Belinga’s companies, and signed payment instructions by senior civil servants.

There were alleged payments to Belinga from various state budgets dating back to 2013, with dates, names and amounts of money to pay for his Gucci business suits, security, transport and even fire extinguishers for his office.

Though the footers of most pages had been deleted, it can be seen that much of this dossier had been output by a printer in Probmis, the budget information systems program of the ministry of finance. Someone with access to the government computer system had seemingly searched for anything relating to Belinga and printed it out. It was a 137-page journalist’s dream.

“But that information was all over Cameroon already,” says the source. “Many of us knew about this.” Zogo had circulated the entire dossier not only to the presidency but also to government departments, police, the two anti-corruption commissions, the courts, the secret service and colleagues in the media, on 22 December 2022, more than three weeks before he died.

The allegation that $79m had been paid to Belinga from state coffers was even older. It had been made by other news outlets too, and he had already taken one to court for defamation. By 1 December 2022, the date the dossier was printed, Belinga had long been facing a tax bill of $50m over undeclared income dating back to at least 2021.

Reports about the Cameroon government’s grant funding to Belinga to buy a France-based TV channel for the diaspora called Telesud had caused an outcry as far back as February 2020. “Telesud has an audience of zero,” a commentator wrote at the time. “Is this not just money laundering?” Another commentator on Actu Cameroun was outraged that “millions” were used for salaries for staff in France “for a channel that nobody watches”.

In the controversy around the Telesud deal, Belinga was publicly supported by at least two government ministers. In parliament, the finance minister, Louis-Paul Motaze, said the esteemed representatives should “applaud” Belinga, because he as a Cameroonian had had the “ambition” to “buy assets in a white country (chez les blancs)”.

Belinga was also a vulgar man, not sophisticated at all. He was getting too big for his boots

Senior media source

From 2020 onwards, reporting involving Belinga more frequently pointed to such payments, also propping him up as a presidential contender. In July 2020, a website called the Cameroon Intelligence Report denounced a “conspiracy to make Belinga president as the figurehead of a government faction”.

Belinga’s alleged friends in government were Motaze and justice minister Esso. According to the police, Esso had allocated state-paid prison guards as private security for Belinga’s home. Zogo had repeated accusations against Esso and Motaze as Belinga’s paymasters during one of his broadcasts.

“They were the faction positioning Belinga,” says a senior media source. “Others didn’t like that.” What was even more irritating, they add, was that “besides the issue of the different factions, Belinga was also a vulgar man, not sophisticated at all. He was getting too big for his boots.”

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“We should look at the others,” agrees a colleague close to corruption investigations in Cameroon. “The others are what nobody talks about.”

He shows his own dossier – documents from the tax office. A letter dated 5 July 2021, signed by the then director general of Cameroon’s tax agency, Modeste Mopa Fatoing, is in the file too. Fatoing instructs his staff to “urgently look at these affairs”.

Sixty-seven foreign exchange companies, tourist and transport firms, mining companies, hotels, money-transfer agencies, financial consulting companies, a consortium in Strasbourg, and even one “jeune fille ambitieuse”, a “young and ambitious girl” behind a vehicle and touring company for high-end visitors to Cameroon – the papers, stamped by Cameroon’s revenue service and covering the four years from 2017 to 2021, show large amounts paid from state accounts to these entities in order of value, from the equivalent of $275m to much smaller sums.

About $656m has been paid by the state to companies in Nigeria, Togo, France and the US. One is in Equatorial Guinea, one is led by an Italian, one organises tourist trips to Central African Republic. There is also a line with the name of a billionaire businessman, reportedly close to Biya, in South Africa.

Many seem to have one characteristic in common: the ability to channel money out of Cameroon.

Corrupt political leaders and their friends “always like tax havens”, says tax expert Yolisa Pikie, who has investigated the billions of dollars siphoned off during Jacob Zuma’s reign in South Africa.

“But you especially need to take your illicit money out when there is political turmoil. You may have kept some of it in bags in your house previously, but now you are not sure what will happen if a rival comes to power.”

Cameroon’s power players are notorious for keeping enormous wealth in their houses, and there was an escalation in getting loot abroad around 2017 when the president’s age was coming under scrutiny.

To date, however, nothing appears to have happened in this investigation. Fatoing was moved from his post by Biya, to take up a position at the International Monetary Fund in Washington in January.

In January 2022, Biya ordered a travel ban against Belinga, because “he is under investigation for deals with ministers”. In February 2022, he ordered an audit into all government money paid in irregular ways, dating back 12 years, from 2010 up to and including 2021. All that surfaced from this exercise in the media was, once again, reports on money received by Belinga.

“Cela arrive dans un contexte de suspicions nées de la circulation, toujours dans les réseaux de documents faisant état de l’utilisation des lignes en question pour le financement des activités de Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga,” writes the online news site ecomatin.net. “This [audit] happens in a context of suspicions born from the circulation of documents reporting the use of the [budget] lines in question for the financing of the activities of Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga,” making it appear again as if Belinga is the only one ever to get such payments.

According to Biya’s own published assessment, the total of these budget lines since 2010 amounts to $8.5bn, close to 12% of all state budgets. According to the Zogo dossier, payments received by Belinga over the past 10 years were $79m, just under 1% of this total.

In August 2022, a summons for a court hearing was issued to a very significant person. The powerful Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, the secretary of state, is known to command practically every department in the government “on the highest instructions of the supreme head of state”. He is a close confidant of Biya’s wife, she of the giant red wigs, who has a faction in the palace wars named after her.

The court in Cameroon began investigating reports that Ngoh Ngoh was behind the disappearance in 2021 of $123m in donor funds meant for Covid relief. Alerted to this, some media in the country started looking into amounts Ngoh Ngoh’s office received. In October 2022, the court issued an arrest warrant for Ngoh Ngoh.

But on 28 October, Biya ordered the suspension of the warrant, declaring his full confidence in Ngoh Ngoh. A little over a month later, government printers apparently spewed out Zogo’s dossier data about all the supposed payments to Belinga over the past 10 years. It’s not clear who gave it to Zogo, but he began circulating it around Yaoundé with a covering letter dated 22 December 2022.

Belinga is a thug … And he does know how to get sections of the secret service and the police to do his bidding

That Belinga would have killed Zogo “is possible”, one source said.

In 2022, one of ZAM’s reporters in Cameroon, who had written a critical story about Belinga, was badly beaten on his own doorstep by men who claimed to be working for the media tycoon. Belinga has also been linked – allegedly through hired men – to street fights and violence.

He was charged and briefly jailed before being released in connection with the murder of a young man called Bryan Formbor, the ex-boyfriend of a Vision4 TV anchorwoman, Ivana Essomba, herself now on trial for the killing.

“He is a thug. He might have gotten into a rage. And he does know how to get sections of the secret service and the police to do his bidding, through bluster and blackmail and leveraging powerful friends,” says the source. But he agrees that in a situation where Belinga knew that a powerful cabal in the presidency was out to get him, killing Zogo was not a clever thing to do. “He is reportedly now worried about being killed in jail, because powerful factions don’t want him to talk.”

The opposition leader, “Iron Lady” Kah Walla, speaking in her office in Douala, has been arrested more than once for speaking out. She cautions: “You may think that the Biya regime is ready to collapse, but there is a whole sophisticated political engineering behind it. It is a scientific dictatorship.

“Biya, old or not, is a master of violence. He practices irrational violence; violence without cause and without logic. Everyone is afraid, since no one knows the limits not to cross.”

She is convinced that in the Zogo case, a “faction within [those in] power wanted to use the murder to destroy this other branch. This is what led to all these arrests of high personalities within the circles of power. All the whistleblowers are close to the regime.”

After the killing and arrests, everything stopped abruptly, she adds. “As if there had been some sort of agreement between the warring branches; as if there was an overnight meeting during which they decided to put the ball down. Like they said to themselves: ‘If I fall, you fall too.’ Suddenly, overnight, there were no more arrests.”

Months after the murder, there is neither news on a trial date nor about the audit into the government funds, nor about the tax investigation into the 67 instances that funnelled so much state money out of Cameroon. The tax director who had pushed for an inquiry is gone.

Motaze and Esso are “quiet now” as well. “They almost arrested Esso, too,” says the senior editor colleague, grinning. Few government ministers are liked in Cameroon.

Meanwhile, Kah Walla and her team are demanding investigations into another, lesser-known murder, of Zogo’s journalist friend Jean-Jacques Ola Bebe, who was shot on 3 February 2023. No one has been arrested in his case, but – just like Zogo – Ola Bebe had made a public accusation just before his death.

He had defended Belinga. He had told the presenter on private broadcaster Mo’o TV’s daily show Boîte Noire that journalists should be impartial because even “your own camps won’t guarantee your survival”. He went on to say that “you get used and afterwards, there is no other win for them, on the contrary, now you are an embarrassing witness … at some point you might tell people that it was so-and-so who gave you these documents. And voilà.”

He was found dead the next morning.

Belinga, Danwe and Eko Eko are in jail awaiting trial. Esso has not been arrested. According to a Cameroonian news site, however, he has been asked by President Biya “to explain himself”.

Culled from The Guardian

A list of 67 suspicious transactions scheduled for investigation by Cameroon’s tax agency shows a total equivalent of $656 million in undeclared payments from state coffers to questionable business entities and individuals. The list, obtained by the Arizona Project team in Cameroon (see box at end of article), covers the period 2017 to 2021 and contains the names of beneficiaries with foreign connections, some real and some possibly fake.

However, the tax investigations, initiated by former tax agency Director-General Mopa Fatoing, seem to have been snuffed out. No results have been forthcoming and Mr Fatoing was recently removed from his post by Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya.

This is another finding of the Arizona Project (See story: ‘The murder of Martinez Zogo’) investigation into the murder of journalist Martinez Zogo, which was conducted by Cameroonian and West African journalists in ZAM’s partner Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors (NAIRE), together with the ZAM platform itself and international partners in Italy, Nigeria, Togo, and Equatorial Guinea (see credit box). There are no indications whatsoever that any one of the individuals named on the list -except for Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, who is now jailed on charges in connection with the case- have anything to do with the murder of Martinez Zogo. But the journalist’s gruesome killing created a climate of terror and silence in which any and all corruption investigations in Cameroon, including the tax agency’s list of 67 cases, came to a standstill.

A terse letter

According to a letter written by former tax Director-General Mopa Modeste Fatoing, his office was put on the trail of the 67 cases by the state’s own anti-corruption agency, ANIF (L’Agence Nationale d’investigation Financière). ANIF investigates fraud and money laundering concerning state finances and is attached to the Ministry of Finance. The letter, which was attached to the Excel spreadsheet of the 67 transactions, is dated 5 July 2021. It is addressed by Fatoing to his revenue service’s “monsieur le chef de division des enquêtes, de la programmation et du suivi des controles,” i.e. the investigations divisions chief.

The tone of the letter is terse. “I had already instructed you to follow up on (the list),” he wrote. “Up to today, these instructions have not been followed. ANIF needs dossier numbers to work with.” However, little has been heard from the tax office on the list of 67. Mr Fatoing was removed and posted to an office position at the IMF in Washington on 26 January 2023, a mere four days after the murdered body of Martinez Zogo was found in the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé.

Titled “état des dossiers programmables” (“status of cases to be scheduled”), the Excel sheet containing the 67 payment lines shows that the tax agency is, or at least was, concerned that individuals with access to Cameroon’s state budget paid out massive amounts of state money for mostly unclear services between 2017 and 2021 to, inter alia, foreign exchange and money transfer companies, mining and wood logging companies, tourist and transport companies, hotels and financial consulting companies. In twenty-nine of the sixty-seven cases, there was no indication of what the money was for.

The 67 transactions also include a substantial number of payments to companies connected to media mogul Amougou Belinga, who was arrested in January 2023 on charges in connection with the murder of Martinez Zogo and for which he is still awaiting trial (See story: ‘The life and trials of a media tycoon’). According to the spreadsheet, Belinga’s companies could have received payments amounting to the FCFA equivalent of $125 million. But even though Belinga’s cases have largely been made public in Cameroon, were very publicly investigated by the tax authorities, and form the background of the current charges against him in the Martinez Zogo case, he is not the biggest fish to be found in the tax agency’s Excel sheet (1). That is an Italian called Eugenio Matarazzi, whose forestry company Société Industrielle de Mbang (SIM) appears to have received more than double that: over $273 million for “wood logging” in one transaction alone. According to the spreadsheet, Matarazzi also received $200,000 personally (see below for SIM’s and Matarazzi’s comments).

The Italian link

Unrelated to the tax case, Arizona Project Team partner Edoardo Anziano of IRPI (Investigative Reporting Project Italy, found that Matarazzi’s company has a reputation for illegal logging in Cameroon. In 2004, Anziano reports, the NGO Global Witness found irregularities in forest concessions where SIM was subcontracted by another company. In one case, this company “through its sub-contractor SIM” was found guilty of “timber extraction out of the limits (…), of failure in marking the stumps and trees, and of abandoning the timber produced.” In 2005, the following year, the NGO Greenpeace claimed that “the Cameroonian-based timber company Société Industrielle de Mbang (SIM) is involved in large-scale illegal logging in Cameroon, both directly and indirectly.”

Reports from local communities allegedly affected by SIM’s logging operations align with these accusations. “In the Mbam et Kim region, this company now has a virtual monopoly on logging operations, which it has won with the active support of a highly influential local elite,” a senior official of the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife told the news site Cameroun24. According to the Association des Journalistes Africains pour l’Environnement (Association of Environmental Journalists) in Cameroon, other officials have defined SIM’s activities as “illegal plundering of forests.”

The forestry minister helped, forest communities protested

According to a Facebook post from 2015 about a visit to Italy organised by the “Cameroon-Italy Friendship Association”, both the Italian ambassador to Cameroon and Matarazzi were present at a dinner organised by Theodore Datouo, the deputy speaker of the Cameroonian parliament. But Datouo is only one of a number of influential contacts of Matarazzi in Cameroon. His principal ally is forestry minister Jules Doret Ndongo, who has extended many forest concessions to SIM and has, according to a reliable source, also been instrumental in granting public money to SIM after it threatened to declare bankruptcy and lay off hundreds of its staff unless it was granted government assistance.

In 2020, community representatives of the eastern region of Lom and Djerem in Cameroon wrote to Doret Ndongo to ask him to stop yet another concession to SIM “because our water comes from the forest,” according to news site Stopblabla.com.

We could not establish if the concession continued regardless.

Both Matarazzi’s contacts Datouo and Ndongo are reportedly close to Chantal Biya, the wife of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya.

In a letter sent in response to questions, SIM said that it does not ‘sell anything to the state of Cameroon’ and that it also ‘has never requested and does not receive state subsidies’, adding that Mr. Eugenio Matarazzi ‘has never requested or obtained money from the Cameroonian state.’ SIM attached tax certificates, dated 13 and 15 June 2023, declaring that neither it nor Mr Matarazzi owe any tax to the state of Cameroon. It also attached confirmation of a tax audit, dated 15 February 2022,, that covered the four years 2017, 2018, 21019, 2020, i.e. the same period as the list in ZAM’s possession. The tax audit confirmation letter reads, inter alia, that ‘envisaged adjustments were brought to the attention of the taxpayer.’ In its letter, SIM cites this, adding that ‘to our knowledge, this verification did not reveal the criminal acts which would have been reported to you.’ With regard to the reported irregularities in SIM’s forest concessions, the company said that “in Cameroon, forest concessions are awarded by the State and in particular the Ministry in charge of public procurement on the basis of objective criteria and following an open and transparent procedure. It is not uncommon for losers to cry out about “unfair competition” and “fraud”.” The company reiterated that accusations of irregularities, illegal logging, plunder and benefiting from elite connections are part of such “smear campaigns”.

Another major recipient of state money on the list of 67 is a foreign exchange company based in Maroua in the far northern part of Cameroon, which borders Chad and Nigeria: it received the equivalent of $227 million for unspecified services. A third recipient, a company that goes by its abbreviation, FINEX, received $38 million for “transport.” This appears to show that the government paid the real bus company First National Express FINEX for travel, which it provides between Cameroon’s two main cities Yaoundé and Douala. However, close scrutiny through the Orbis company database reveals that the FINEX beneficiary listed on the spreadsheet is a different company. The one on the list has (among other numbers) a Mauritanian phone number, is in shipping, and is represented by a person whose phone number is in Yaoundé but whose email address appears to be from within the French multinational construction company Bolloré network.

“No road like that”

Also in the top ten, in 6th and 7th place respectively, are two directors of companies in Nigeria, who were paid the equivalent of $13 million and $7 million respectively. The first director’s company could not be traced to its registered address at 10 Market Road in Uyo, the capital of Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria’s South-South. Colleagues from the Nigerian online news platform the Premium Times (PT) www.premiumtimesng.com, who went to check in Uyo, were told that “it does not exist” by local residents, cab drivers and other transport operators. The Chairperson of the Uyo Local Government Area, Uwemedimo Udo, told the team in a text message, “No road like that to my knowledge, please.”

The PT team also could not find the second director’s company at its registered address of Plot 3, block 38, Yinka Bello street off Admirality Way 12 in Lekki Phase 1, Lagos. “The occupants of the building in the said address are Lagos Bridge Hotel,” the PT team reported. “An official of the hotel said they have occupied the space since 2006, three years before the incorporation of (the company you are looking for).” Neither of the two companies seems to have a website, and an extensive search shows that they don’t have an online presence on social networking platforms. “All efforts to retrieve contacts for the individuals or their company ask them for comment proved futile,” reported the PT team.

A person listed in 9th place is based in Jaipur, India and received $5.6 million for unspecified services. We could not find any functional contact details for the businessman, but a person matching the name and the Cameroonian company registration is listed as chairing a company in “raw farm products” with headquarters in Singapore, which does not appear to have a website, nor a contact address or email. It shares its Singapore address with a shipping company. The same individual is also listed as a director of a travel company with offices in Abuja and Kano in Nigeria, but there was no response at either of the two listed office telephone numbers when the Premium Times team tried to call. No contacts could be found for two other companies registered to the same person in Benin either. In 10th place is a company in Yaoundé, which received $5.5 million, also for unspecified services. According to its Yaoundé registration, the entity does market research into “wellness,” but no response was obtained from emails and phone calls to the listed contacts.

Foldout or box

The case of Baba Danpoulo and his friendship with the president

The payment amounts for the last seven entries on the tax agency Excel sheet are left blank, which means that one cannot assess how much these entities received from Cameroon state budgets. Most remarkably, among these seven entries is the name of Baba Danpoulo, a multi-millionaire reputed to be one of Africa’s ten richest men and a personal friend of President Paul Biya. Danpoulo, who claims to be worth at least $940 million, stands accused by South Africa’s First National Bank of defaulting on loan and interest repayments to the extent of $165 million, for which FNB has attached buildings he bought with his loans in South Africa, including the Thibault building in Cape Town and a 32-storey high rise in Johannesburg.

In response and amid much outrage in Cameroon government circles, a Cameroon court froze the bank accounts of two South African companies operating in Cameroon, the mobile network MTN and Tiger Brands subsidiary Chococam, in November 2022. The two companies recently approached a higher court in Cameroon for leave to appeal this action. This retaliation has been called “ridiculous” by an anonymous “advocate who specialises in international law” in Cameroon. The advocate published an in-depth analysis of the wrangle in Cameroonian media, agreeing with South Africa’s foreign affairs minister Naledi Pandor that such acts “damage international relations.” “And we are not even asking where Baba Danpoulo got all his wealth from,” the advocate commented.

Baba Danpoulo’s lawyer Aggée Mbanzehe said in response to questions that “these are very sensitive and I need to discuss with my client.” When approached again four days later, Mbanzehe reiterated that “Mr Baba is not around and I need his special authorisation to give any information about those sensitive issues.”

Among the next twenty listed beneficiaries from payments ranging from $4.5 to $1.5 million are: a mining company registered in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, that does not appear to have a website or a functioning email address; a construction company registered in Oman; an import-export company registered in Nigeria under a Nigerian representative but with a Cameroonian married couple as directors and a person with the same name as a director of a previously sanctioned Belgium-based diamond buying company which does much business in Central Africa. Phone calls to the company’s listed office in Antwerp, made to ask for comment on its inclusion on the tax agency list were left without a response and an email bounced. A travel company with branches in Togo, whose director, according to our investigative partner in Togo, is from Benin, would have received close to $2 million from Cameroonian state coffers. The director, who was reached by phone, denied this, saying he or his companies had never received any payment from the state of Cameroon.

A money transfer company with offices in Equatorial Guinea as well as in Cameroon features in 23rd place on the list and has, according to the tax agency’s spreadsheet, received over $1.5 million. Colleagues from the Equatorial Guinean Diario Rombe, which operates from exile in Spain, knew of this company as connected to ruling circles in that country.  Upon investigating, they discovered that, on the business site ZoomInfo, the company is listed at a New York address with a number of US-based representatives. However, the same people appear on several similar-looking websites with what are probably stock photos, exactly the same every time, while the contact phone number listed on ZoomInfo is still Cameroonian.

“Customers left high and dry”

The same money transfer company has recently been the target of much outrage in Cameroon. A local colleague reports, “It stopped paying out money that came from (the diaspora in) Europe. It even closed its doors. It is rumoured that some Africans in the diaspora with a base in Strasbourg, France have accumulated money abroad and customers in Cameroon have been left high and dry.”

A phone call by the local colleague to the company’s branch in Akwa, Douala, was answered by a security man and later by an administrative employee, but neither of these responded to the question of whether operations were ongoing, or where the Cameroonian CEO who has reportedly not been seen for a while, might be reached. All other efforts to contact the company or its representatives for comment on the current situation as well as on its inclusion on the tax agency’s list, whether by email or phone, also remained fruitless.

The company’s website seems only intermittently functional, but its Facebook page still lists Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Strasbourg as its areas of operation. A recent posting on its page by a dissatisfied customer called “Stella Alexis” says “Tsuippp, agence fausse,” which roughly translates as “you are a damn fake agency.”

USA fronts

A number of other companies that feature on the list are ostensibly registered in the United States, but these registrations may, like the money transfer company’s New York registration on ZoomInfo, be fronts for individuals who are resident in Cameroon or Central Africa itself. These individuals may also be using the names and logos of other people, or other real companies, without their knowledge.

A Cameroon-based man, for example, 24th on the list and the recipient of around $1.5 million, is using the logo of a financial consulting company CBIZ based in Cleveland, USA, on his LinkedIn profile, claiming that he is a “documents controller” for CBIZ. A spokesperson for CBIZ in Cleveland told us that they did not know this man, nor have they worked with any Cameroonians.

Another Cameroonian, who according to the tax agency document was paid around $670,000 through his Cameroon-based company for “cellulose products,” mentions on his LinkedIn profile that he lives in Chicago, US. A ZoomInfo page mentions the same man as a co-founder of an identically named company in California, USA. Like CBIZ in Cleveland, the California-based company said in response to questions that they did not know the man, nor have they worked with any Cameroonians.

Our investigations into the cases on the list did not include Amougou Belinga’s companies, since payments from state coffers to him were widely investigated and published in Cameroon, inter alia by Martinez Zogo, already. (To find out more read ‘The murder of Martinez Zogo’).

Foldout

Our correspondence with the International Monetary Fund

On 14 June 2023, ZAM wrote to the IMF in Washington, asking to be connected to former Cameroon Directorate of Taxation Director-General, Modeste Fatoing. Fatoing had been pushing to investigate the 67 cases but was transferred by President Biya to an IMF post in Washington on 26 January 2023, four days after Martinez Zogo’s mutilated body was found in a suburb in Yaoundé. No response to the email was received. ZAM emailed a second time on 20 June 2023, this time including more detail, saying that it was “very important that (Modeste Fatoing) is made aware of questions relating to his posting to the IMF, four days after the murder of journalist Martinez Zogo in Cameroon.” Our email continued to say that our working hypothesis was that “both the murder (of Zogo) and Mr Fatoing’s posting (were) connected to illicit financial flows that the Cameroon revenue service was investigating under the leadership of Mr Fatoing” and that “this investigation appeared to have come to a halt after the murder of Zogo and the removal from Cameroon of Mr Fatoing.” Our email asked that, “in the case that Mr Fatoing is not able or willing, or cannot be enabled by you, to give his views on the above,” the IMF itself answer the following questions:

1. Were or are you aware that Mr Fatoing was posted to the IMF by Cameroon’s president days after the murder of journalist Martinez Zogo?

2. Were or are you aware that Martinez Zogo had forcefully denounced high level corruption, particularly illicit payments to a businessman, Amougou Belinga, who stands accused of having externalised millions of dollars in Cameroon state money towards personal business ventures in France?

3. Were or are you aware that Mr Belinga is now in jail in Cameroon on charges of the murder of Martinez Zogo, whose mutilated body was found on 22 January 2023 in Yaounde?

4. Were or are you aware that the Cameroon revenue service under the leadership of Mr Fatoing was investigating no less than 67 illicit financial outflows from Cameroon state coffers (including ones who benefited Mr Belinga), many of which seem to have ended up in European countries as well as in the United States?

5. Were or are you aware that this investigation has come to a standstill after Mr Fatoing’s departure from Cameroon to the IMF?

6. What is your comment on the current situation, where it appears as if the IMF is sheltering a corruption fighter who has been sidelined from Cameroon?

7. Protective as such shelter might be to Mr Fatoing, how does the IMF envisage proceeding vis a vis Cameroon, where monetary and financial policy appear not to be in good order and corruption fighting institutions, as well as the revenue service, are noticeably silent after the murder of Martinez Zogo and the removal of Mr Fatoing?

8. Does the IMF aim to encourage good financial governance in countries like Cameroon and if so, how does it do that? Our email ended with the sentence that “we would very much like to include your and Mr Modeste Fatoing’s comments for our publication.”

To this email, an IMF spokesperson responded on the same day, 20-6-2023, that:

* The issues concerning the work done by the tax agency in Cameroon are best dealt with by the relevant institutions in Cameroon. It is not in the IMF’s purview to comment on this.

* To clarify, the employment of IMF staff is based on a rigorous and impartial recruitment process that is driven by IMF guidelines and international best practices for recruitment. Modeste Fatoing Mopa was competitively selected to the position of Head of TADAT secretariat in our Fiscal Affairs Department in a process that attracted several internal and external candidates. Modeste started his functions at the IMF on February 6, 2023.

The ZAM and NAIRE Arizona Project

The Arizona Project model dates back to 1976, when Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had been working on stories about land fraud and the Italian-American mafia in Arizona, was blown up in an explosion caused by TNT that had been placed under his car. In response to the murder, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) in the US put together a team of 30 reporters who gathered in Phoenix to finish Bolles’s story. It was the first large-scale collaborative investigative journalism project in history.

After the murder of Martinez Zogo, the Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors (NAIRE) initiated a discussion with ZAM on the possibilities of carrying out an Arizona Project in Cameroon in order to assist colleagues under siege in that country and retrieve important information. ZAM agreed to use its office as a base for the coordination.

The decision to send colleagues into Cameroon was not taken lightly. It would be risky because of the danger of violence, detention, and torture for which Cameroonian security forces are known. However, NAIRE found members willing to go regardless. They were Selay Kouassi from Ivory Coast, David Dembélé from Mali, and Bram Posthumus, also based in Ivory Coast. They were to work in close contact with Cameroon-based colleagues, who had access to information but could not be exposed for their safety. These colleagues, as much as ZAM and NAIRE would like to credit them in full, cannot be named for the same reason.

Investigations editor Evelyn Groenink worked full-time in the ZAM back office to coordinate the project, serve as liaison, and edit the results.

When the team discovered that illicit financial flows from Cameroon to foreign countries were a crucial factor in the murder of Martinez Zogo, international partners in the Global Investigative Journalism Network were also ready to help. These were:

• The Investigative Reporting Project Italy, in particular reporter Edoardo Anziano, who dived into the case on the Italian side.

• Premium Times reporter Kabiru Yusuf, who, in spite of the investigative publication’s heavy workload, was made available by his editors to work on the Nigerian and USA fronts of the story.

• Diario Rombe (Equatorial Guinea/Spain), which investigated a money transfer agency link between Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.

• Pierre-Claver Kuvo , editor of De Cive in Togo and coordinator of the Togolese Consortium of Investigative Journalists “Togo Reporting Post”, who focused on the links to Togo and Benin.

ZAM and NAIRE extend their greatest thanks to these colleagues, who worked with (other) African investigative journalists in solidarity.

The project also owes thanks to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), which provided crucial and much-needed advice.

Culled from Premium Times Nigeria

As the war in Ukraine rages on—and the West’s limited attention to Africa focuses on Sudan—the civil war in the Anglophone part of Cameroon meanders along. It continues into its sixth year without any sign of political settlement due not to Western indifference and inaction, but to Western diffidence and actions that send the wrong signals to the kleptocratic regime of President Paul Biya.

France is hardly signaling that it wants to be part of solving the Anglophone crisis peacefully. And despite a strong, bipartisan U.S. Senate resolution passed in January 2021 calling for dialogue to end the conflict, and the Biden administration’s extension of Temporary Protected Status to Cameroonians in June 2022, the White House and State Department have otherwise taken no public action toward promoting peace.

There are lessons from Sudan that will likely remain unlearned in Cameroon until it is too late, when a looming crisis over Biya’s successor could potentially drive conflict from the periphery to the center of the country. Cameroon offers a similar and tragic case study for Western foreign policy toward the continent.

Lack of consequences for military leaders in Sudan since 2019, and lack of support for civil movements and institutions by outside actors, led to a culture of impunity and violence escalating to an all-out struggle for political and economic power. With an impending succession crisis, endless war on the frontiers, a factionalized governing party, and fragmented security forces, Cameroon faces similar risks. Outside actors have not yet grasped that a lack of consequences for those with guns puts everyone without guns in jeopardy.

It’s not that no one is ringing alarm bells about Cameroon. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide released a brief in May entitled “Preventing and Mitigating Mass Atrocities in Northwest and Southwest Cameroon: Identifying Policy Options,” highlighting the urgent need for global attention. The Norwegian Refugee Council has included Cameroon on its list of the top 10 “most neglected displacement crises” for the fourth year in a row. The International Crisis Group released a report in March that offered some concrete proposals toward political reform.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that, given various crises, one out of six Cameroonians needs humanitarian assistance and protection, totaling 4.7 million people. In May, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect confirmed the current official figure of at least 6,000 killed since late 2017 in the Anglophone regions and at least 715,000 displaced. The actual numbers are likely much higher.

With an impending succession crisis, endless war on the frontiers, a factionalized governing party, and fragmented security forces, Cameroon faces similar risks to Sudan.

Over the past six months, as attention focused elsewhere, the situation in Cameroon has gone from bad to worse. Some hope emerged when Canada announced publicly in January that it “welcomes the agreement by the parties to enter a process to reach a comprehensive, peaceful and political resolution of the conflict” and that it had “accepted the mandate to facilitate this process, as part of our commitment to promote peace and security and advance support for democracy and human rights.” Various other domestic groups and external actors, including Pope Francis, quickly announced their support of the Canadian effort.

Three days later, however, the Biya government countered that “it has not entrusted any foreign country or external entity with any role of mediator or facilitator to settle the crisis in the North-West and South-West Regions.” Any nascent momentum toward peace ground to a halt, and suffering persists unabated.

In fact, the Biya regime continues to be rewarded in ways that ensure military repression continues, with no incentive to pursue a negotiated peace nor substantive political reforms. That same week in January that the government denied a Canadian-facilitated peace process, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its third review of Cameroon’s economic situation after meetings earlier in the month. This led to yet another tranche ($73 million) for Cameroon after the IMF board met in March. All IMF reports on Cameroon since the original, three-year (2017-2020) Extended Credit Facility emergency bailout gloss over the impact of war, mismanagement, and kleptocracy on economic growth and development outcomes.

The regime is increasingly confident that loans, grants, investment, and humanitarian assistance will keep rolling in no matter what it does.

The IMF’s fourth review, released on June 29, kept that tradition as it unlocked a further $74 million. While it admits, with typical understatement, that “Cameroon’s performance under the program is mixed” and that “three of five indicative targets under the program have been repeatedly missed,” the fourth review never mentions ongoing war and excessive military expenditures.

By April 2023, Cameroonian officials were emboldened enough to publicly announce their intention to regain eligibility under Washington’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the preferential trade terms for some African states that former U.S. President Donald Trump removed due to human rights abuses back in 2019. While AGOA eligibility would have minimal impact on Cameroon’s economic fortunes, it would be another diplomatic victory for the regime, one that manipulates Western interests to limit consequences of its poor domestic track record. In June, the government confirmed support from the U.N. system for “reconstruction and development” in the Anglophone regions even as the war rages on.

The regime is increasingly confident that loans, grants, investment, and humanitarian assistance will keep rolling in no matter what it does, so instead of trying to improve the economy or end the war, it continues to import military hardware and expand its already bloated and fragmented security forces.

Cameroon is thus looking more like Sudan every day as insecurity and economic stagnation resulting from poor governance is ignored by external actors. Besides growing criminal insecurity in its major cities, killings of journalists, and a spreading cholera crisis, the country faces nearly interminable conflict along its periphery, in what was formerly the British Southern Cameroons (the two Anglophone regions), the British Northern Cameroons (where Boko Haram and its successors continue to threaten villages and farms), and along the border with perennially unstable Central African Republic.

Labelling all insecurity as simply “terrorism” for an international audience, Cameroon convinces many countries to keep selling it arms, vehicles, and aircraft. The impending succession crisis after more than 40 years under Biya will thus take place in a weakly institutionalized political system where the ability and propensity to employ violence has increased dramatically. Sudan offers a stark warning of the possible consequences.

While Sudanese and outside stakeholders rejoiced over longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir’s removal from office in April 2019, the transitional government was in place just long enough for Sudan to reach the first stage of its long-delayed acceptance into the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. In June 2021, the IMF and World Bank boards approved initial debt relief for Sudan, dropping the accumulated $56 billion debt to $28 billion. At that point, Sudan was on track for its own Extended Credit Facility and, later, to even further debt relief under HIPC.

But the October 2021 coup, and now the outright destruction of the country by two rival generals since April 2023, reversed those limited gains. Arms exports to and joint ventures within Sudan (including with Russia’s Wagner Group) ensured both sides were well-equipped even as the economy suffered a decadelong slide. War usually fought on the periphery has now reached most cities and regions across the country. So, besides the enormous human toll, private capital formation and public infrastructure are being destroyed at a rapid rate from Khartoum to West Darfur. The volunteer, neighborhood resistance committees once crucial to the transition in 2019 but subsequently sidelined now scramble to fill the gaps of a collapsing state.

The development in Sudan of two separate military institutions—the regular armed forces and the institutionalization of the irregular Janjaweed militia as the Rapid Support Forces in the mid-2010s—ultimately did not fulfill at least one key objective of Bashir’s regime: It did not coup-proof his regime by building up two countervailing forces. Those rival military organizations are now tearing the country apart.

Cameroon has followed a similar process of expansion and bifurcation of security services over the past two decades, and the resulting situation creates the potential for confrontation once Biya, now 90, becomes incapacitated. There is a constitutional process of succession, triggering a presidential election within months, but few expect the ruling party factions to rally behind any one candidate. (Biya may yet hang on and run in the 2025 election at age 92, or pass off his baton to his son Franck). A real concern is that different ruling party factions have influence over different branches of the fragmented security forces.

The Presidential Guard protects the President and key government installations The regular armed forces have a traditional three-branch (army, navy, air force) structure, and contribute to a regular peacekeeping rotation in the Central African Republic, but the regular army is the least well-equipped compared to the Presidential Guard and the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), a separate branch established in 2001 under Israeli military advisors. The BIR has since expanded to a number of individual battalions as well as its own air and maritime components, and is permanently engaged in combat operations against both Boko Haram and Anglophone armed groups.

While both the Presidential Guard and the BIR are controlled directly by the presidency, they report up different factional chains of command and keep a close eye on each other.

Besides the expansion and fragmentation of the security forces, since 2020, new armored vehicle imports have been identified from Canada, France, and mostly from the United Arab Emirates. At least two used Bell 412EP helicopters (built in North America and powered by Pratt & Whitney Canada engines) were procured since 2019, joining others already in service. Four new Italian-built Leonardo AW109E helicopters have been delivered more recently; they were photographed flying in a May 20 military parade and elsewhere in Cameroon after being held up in Italy since 2018 due to either lack of money or export permits, or both.

And this new equipment is on the top of the significant military assistance from China, France, Israel, Serbia, South Africa, and the United States between 2014-2018 to help in the struggle against Boko Haram. Many of those aircraft, vehicles, and helicopter assets have since been deployed to the Anglophone areas, including U.S. surveillance aircraft, Chinese tank destroyers, and the more recent Italian helicopters.

In short, there is no incentive for the Cameroonian government to agree to substantive peace negotiations, better economic management, or political reforms. The various political factions are solely focused on jockeying for power in preparation of the post-Biya era. There are simply no consequences to Biya and ruling-party factions under him for continuing the war (and considerable evidence that many benefit from its continuation): There is no effective elected opposition, there are few restrictions on military imports, international financing continues from all sources, there is no pressure coming from neighbors or other African leaders or organizations to negotiate, and the West keeps sending mixed signals about whether it takes peace and conflict resolution seriously.

Like the military leaders in Sudan who now fight for power without constraint, the factions looking at a post-Biya Cameroon have not faced any consequences for stalling either peace talks or real political (or economic) reform.

The moment Biya loses his grip on power through incapacitation or death, it is possible that similar struggles could break out within the ruling party, with factions leveraging different elements of the security services to back their claims.

The United States, Canada, Norway, the European Union, and key international institutions need to send consistent signals in support of peace, justice, and democracy, rather than call for peace but support the brittle status quo. What peace and justice ultimately look like can only be determined by Cameroonians, but that process requires more openings for potential reformers willing to talk and more restraints on hard-liners before Cameroon advances any further down the road to Khartoum.

Culled from Foreign Policy

The begging-bowl disorder which has engulfed the Cameroon community in the Diaspora is now a pandemic which requires urgent attention with a view to eradicating it.

This disease is always visible when someone dies, and the family creates a WhatsApp forum to beg and pester friends and acquaintances for resources to celebrate the late person’s life.

This week in the United Kingdom, it is the turn to do the honours for the fallen hero of Anglophone Cameroon, Chairman Ni John Fru Ndi who sadly passed away at his residence in Yaoundé on Monday the 12 June 2023.

Chairman John Fru Ndi founded the Social Democratic Party in Cameroon in 1990 and has been widely credited with the advent of multi-party politics in Cameroon.

However, for the last twenty-five years, the Chairman has formed a profitable political business with the CPDM regime. His scandalous association with Paul Biya has earned him over US$12.5 million in the process and made him a very rich man.

Why then are his children and family in the UK about to engage in the laborious activity of petitioning for funds in his name?

Habit and Greed, I guess!

John Fru Ndi’s family is demonstrating the same traits he possessed. He was selfish, self-centered, stingy and devoid of emotions.

The actions of his children and family in England are consistent with the personality of the fallen man. So, over the next few weeks, security officers, health-care assistants, nurses, container loaders and the unemployed within the Cameroon community in England will be harassed and shamed to make contributions to celebrate the life of a man who earned more than US$12.5 million from politics and possesses a few foreign bank accounts where some of his stolen treasure and loot are hidden.

This publication has gathered that some friends have advised the family in the UK not to engage in this public begging disgrace but like the Chairman, his children were not persuaded by such genuine attempts to make them see sense in their looming foolishness. Dignity, a rare currency, is not what they possess and care about.

Self-awareness is evidently not this family’s forte, and it is no surprise that a WhatsApp forum has now been set up to achieve their questionable and disgraceful aims.

Money is needed to bury the dead, but to go about it by compelling the poor to pay for the celebration of the life of a rich man like John Fru Ndi is plain wrong and despicable.

As the apple never falls far from the tree, the descendants are doing what they inherited from their master—financial greed!

It may be normal for the families of people with humble and modest bank balances to seek community support after they die, but there is nothing normal for a very rich man’s family to do so.

Fru Ndi’s family is not poor financially, but it is poor mentally. Their mental poverty is robbing them of the dignity they are supposed to have given their late father’s political status in Cameroon.

In a descent society, a man of Fru Ndi’s status should be given a state burial, making it possible for the poor to have a break.

But Cameroon’s poor, many of whom have fled poverty and are hiding in England, will not know any respite as Mr. Fru Ndi’s family engages in a humiliating game of overt begging and desperation.

Fru Ndi, a man who triggered a wave of hope and optimism in the early 90s when he challenged Paul Biya, Cameroon’s current and sit-tight president, has quit the political stage with very negative ratings due to his incestuous relationship with the ruling party.

He will however be remembered for the courage and charisma he demonstrated in the 90s. May his soul rest in peace!

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Chairman and Editor-In-Chief