Deacon Tassang Wilfred one of Southern Cameroons detained leaders has again released a letter from the Kondengui High Security prison. The former head of SCACUF observed in “As Though We Were Dead” that Southern Cameroonians should consider the NERA 10 as nonexistent.

Deacon Tassang Wilfred is a very brilliant Southern Cameroons trade unionist. He helped shape the character of the Ambazonian revolution and started seeing himself as the leader when he was elected to head SCACUF. He even at one point contradicted Tapang Ivo and Mark Barata during their days at the top and like the Prince of Peace; he observed that “Southern Cameroonians should forgive Tapang Ivo and Mark”.  All these constituted a bargain at a discounted price that was surprisingly available for the renowned Deacon Tassang Wilfred, one of Southern Cameroons revolutionary bells.

Tassang’s style is sometimes colourful sometimes chatty, and in many occasions consistently inconsistent. It is as if the election of Sisiku Ayuk Tabe to head the Interim Government did not go well with him. He writings including his most recent “As Though We Were Dead” indicates that the much respected Ambazonian like some of the fake leaders in the Diaspora is more interested in creating a political space for himself.

His writings have always carried a mixture of analysis blowing hot and cold of failures in the Southern Cameroons quest for independence and accompanied by some uncomfortable moralizing.  Tassang’s approach has always been thematic and not chronological. You need a pretty good knowledge of the Southern Cameroons leadership crisis to make sense of it sometimes and the teacher has a capacity for self-diversion.

But as his most recent letter “As Though We Were Dead” immodestly reveals, Deacon Tassang Wilfred no longer has the remarkable influence on the Southern Cameroons war of independence and politics both domestically and internationally.

Where Tassang can now be challenged is the assertion that Southern Cameroonians should “Consider the Nera10 as dead. Negotiate as though you were seeking retribution for the more than 30,000 wasted Amba souls. Go for La Republique’s balls (excuse my French). We all (Nera10) put together, are not any more deserving of Ambazonia than angel Martha, most brutally butchered in babyhood by the evil from Yaounde.”   The Tassang approach begs the question of who is actually the face of the Ambazonia revolution and who will be on the Southern Cameroons negotiating table?

Tassang seems to argue against a rules-based system of international relations which provides for any revolution or struggle to have a symbolic personality at the head.  To be sure, Tassang’s letter writing policy will be both his legacy and epitaph in his relations with the Ambazonian people and the NERA 10.

So much has been written about the relationship between the Ambazonia leader Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and Deacon Tassang Wilfred. Both men have respectively displayed their particular talents – President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe has his natural guile and persuasiveness and Tassang his intellectual firepower. If the relationship is one of marriage then no court in Southern Cameroons will deny Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and Deacon Tassang Wilfred divorce or dissolution.

Tassang cannot be blowing hot and cold at same time. Saying the Ambazonia leadership should not rule from prison but gives directives and funny instructions now and then from the same prison paints a picture of a man who is either committing the same errors or falling into spectacular new ones.

Now Tassangs says the NERA 10 should be assumed dead or nonexistent by the so-called free leadership …so where does he belong? When he was Chief Executive of SCACUF there was no issue but as soon as Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe took over his attitude has been anything but collaborative!!

The battlelines between his supporters and the Southern Cameroons Interim Government currently under the stewardship of Vice President Dabney Yerima are firmly drawn. But he was and remains a consistently inconsistent phenomenon.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai