Think of it that you are a Southern Cameroonian resident in either the Northern or the Southern Zone. Fifty-eight difficult years of marginalisation, torture, rape, extra judicial killings, and exploitation are behind you; a huge, depressing darkness lies ahead with the French Cameroun army burning and destroying more than 200 of your villages and towns killing more than 3000 women and children and then the French Cameroun tyrant that dooms your fate declares arrogantly that everything will stay like this and that your children should be sent back to school.

Your territory will remain under French Cameroun military occupation forever and ever. The French Cameroun defense minister, Joseph Beti Assomo who hails from the same tribe as the 86 year old head of state Paul Biya and who is actually the second in importance in the crime syndicate regime in Yaoundé that subjugates your leaders, reechoes the two cubes of sugar rhetoric that a Southern Cameroons state will never be established.

Come to think of it that you are a Southern Cameroonian and your women and children are in danger including those who are living in the bushes and those who have managed to escape into neighbouring Nigeria. Everywhere you turn, a Francophone gendarme or a Francophone soldier or a French Cameroun Police officer may open fire at you. Every night, your homes are invaded brutally by elements of the French Cameroun military known popularly as the Rapid Intervention Battalion, BIR. You will never be treated like human beings in a country where your older generation voted peacefully in a plebiscite to create.  They destroy, humiliate, intimidate, perhaps even arrest traditional and religious leaders, possibly without trial.

There are close to 2500 Southern Cameroons detainees. Many have simply disappeared in detention.  If one of your family members is arrested, you will have difficulty visiting him. If you succeed, you will have to pay hundreds of thousands of Franc CFA just to maybe get half an hour’s conversation.

Many Ambazonians have even become accustomed to the French Cameroun land theft policy. At every moment a, French Cameroun civil administrator or members of his family can invade your land, burn your crops or torch your fields and brandish a land certificate issued in French language stating that your ancestral land was handed to him by the government. The French Camerounian will not be brought to justice for this; the gendarmerie officers who are supposed to protect you will stand idly by.  French Camerounians own and run the courts so there’s nothing you can do.

You are indeed a Southern Cameroonian you can’t travel from Akwaya to Mamfe without going through Nigeria!! It’s not easy to move from Kumbo to Jakiri either or Weh to Wum.  A French Camerounian can go to Europe and all over Africa from all the nooks and crannies of French Cameroun name them, Garoua, Maroua, Douala and Yaounde, much more easily than you a Southern Cameroonians can go from Mamfe to Calabar.

Let this be known to Ministers Mengot, Paul Elong, Paul Tasong, Dion Ngute and Barrister Agbor Balla that there are no dreams, no wishes in this Southern Cameroons revolution. Children who are confronted with this kind of situation have a slim chance of accomplishing anything in life, even if they go “Back To School”. All they can look forward to is a life of humiliation and unemployment.

There’s no chance that this situation is about to change anytime soon. French Cameroun is not strong as the leadership claims but has French government backing, the United States is slow in acting, Ikome Sako and Chris Anu have weakened the Ambazonian Interim Government, Boh Herbert, Cho Ayaba, Mbah Akuro and Akwanga are all running out of cash and  isolated, and the world is losing interest in the Southern Cameroons fate. What should Ambazonians do?

We of the Cameroon Concord News Group think that there are two possibilities. The first is to accept, give in, give up and tell Papa Paul Biya that it was a costly mistake to even have tested his political will. The second is to resist. Whom have we respected more in history? Those who passed their days under the oppression and collaborated with it like Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, or those who struggled for their freedom like Thomas Sankara?

This explains why we of this publication are behind President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides who were arrested in Abuja, Nigeria and the Southern Cameroons young men and women who are involved in the armed struggle against invading French Cameroun soldiers. You have every right to resist. In fact, the great Hon. Wirba has made it clear to you all that it is your civil duty to resist. No argument there. Your right to resist occupation is secured in natural justice, in the morals of history and in international law.

The only limitation that the Southern Cameroons Interim Government now faces is on the means of resistance. Ambazonians should be moving from den guns to bombs if not all our demonstrations in capital cities in the West and the lives of our fallen heroes will be all in vain. Are we to despair and give up? This has almost never happened in history, so we’ll continue.  It is our right to resist.

Why should a Southern Cameroons lawyer and leader of the much respected Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium be clamouring for Southern Cameroons parents to again put their children in the hands of people who set live children on fire in Buea and Bamenda universities?

Southern Cameroonians don’t want armed settlers from French Cameroun who invade university campuses and raped students infecting hundreds with HIV.  Southern Cameroonians do not want to be in a country where judges sentence children for making a Boko Haram joke because of their origin. Southern Cameroonians don’t want French Cameroun supported by France to continue tyrannizing them, so they will resist. The Ambazonia Diaspora should start making available their money to Vice President Dabney Yerima. That’s what it means to be part of the Southern Cameroons resistance. We agree that sometimes our Amba Boys have acted with heinous murderousness, but even that is not as bad when compared to the crimes committed by French Cameroun soldiers in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.

Ambazonians, it’s your right; it’s your duty

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai