Comment - Handling The Victory
And as Hollywood has taught everybody, the winners are always the good guys and the losers are the baddies. This time around, West Africa is going to be treated to a scenario that the region is unaccustomed to: the coup stagers lost and the civilian government is still in place, for the moment.
President Paul Biya of Cameroon, when he recovers from the scare that he has had, is obviously going to settle down to receive congratulatory messages from his countrymen and all friendly governments. After that he is going to set about punishing "the rebels and their collaborators" and then he most probably will want to tighten his security so that never again will his country have to endure the nightmarish weekend that it has just gone through.
While extending our congratulations to President Biya, we would urge him to consider the events as a god-sent opportunity to realise that opposition to him exists and should be listened to.
It would be worth his while to consider that if the coup had succeeded, far from being rebels being held in jail or dead or being hunted down today, Colonel Ibrahim Saleb would have been telling Cameroonians and the world that he and his colleagues had moved to save the country from wide-ranging corruption, dictatorial tendencies, tribal divisions and a rule of terror and after repeating it a few times, it will become fact.
Those who are congratulating President Biya today would have been sending their messages of support to "the gallant soldiers who laid down their lives for Cameroon to enjoy real freedom."
In other words, it would be a grave mistake for President Biya to get carried away by the flush of victory in surviving the coup attempt and launch a purge. He has the example of other leaders who have survived coup attempts to go by, when they started seeing enemies and plots behind every door and reduced their people into a nation half of which protest their loyalty unceasingly and the other half which become informants and security agents. The temptation is very great, but such a route invariably means that the leader will become cut off from his people and give cause for other plots one of which will succeed even if as was the recent case in Guinea, it succeeded after the death of the tyrant.
That is why even though this might not seem to be the time for it, we would urge President Biya to start the investigations into the coup attempt not from where the security lapse occurred but from the speeches they would have made had they succeeded - the corruption charges, the tribalism charges, the extravagance charges.
As we pointed out in our issue of September 1983 (Talking Drums Vol. 1 No. 2) the parting of ways between President Biya and his former boss ex-President Ahidjo will not be enough to convince those who have opposed the regime that things have really changed. Now the supporters of Ahidjo also have their own set of grievances which the recent trial, sentencing to death and subsequent commuting to life imprisonment of the ex-President have not done very much to alleviate.
For those who criticised Ahidjo's 20-year almost totalitarian rule, President Biya remains an integral part of that regime who must bear part of the responsibility for the repression. And even though President Biya has undoubtedly made some changes in the general direction of press freedom and personal liberties, they are hardly enough to reverse two decades of Ahidjo's iron-fisted rule.
It has not been lost on anybody also that President Biya, having inherited the one-party state apparatus bequeathed to him by Ahidjo has not found it expedient to dismantle it, but has used it to secure his own 98% success at the polls. It is hardly enough to criticise and condemn Ahidjo and still utilise his set-up as the basis for power.
Obviously the fragile regional, tribal and religious patchwork that has been Cameroon has been cracked wide open and it is going to take an act of supreme statemanship to hold the country together, which act will not be possible if President Biya should fall to the temptation of pursuing the coup plotters along tribal, regional or religious lines.
The reported heavy toll in human life and property ought to serve as a factor to unify the people rather as the catalyst for further blood letting that will not win any friends for President Biya and will definitely not make his regime more secure.
If by President Biya's own assertion, Cameroon is a secular state and it is wrong for anybody to try and force any kind of religious belief on the people, it will be equally wrong to condemn the followers of a particular faith because some of the adherents were involved in the coup attempt.
Cameroon has had the good fortune to enjoy a commodity which is in very short supply in the West African region, that intangible but all important commodity called political stability. Unfortunately that has gone, but the handling of the aftermath will determine whether the world will view the recent events as an unfortunate aberration or as evidence of a fundamental problem likely to recur.
As many of Cameroon's neighbours can attest to, political instability is a label that is very difficult to discard once it is acquired, and with political instability comes economic problems of dimensions that Cameroon has been lucky to avoid so far.
We urge President Biya to adopt a conciliatory attitude towards all his people and to listen more to voices of dissent, that will be the way to convince the world that the events of last weekend were the work of a "few disgruntled elements."
If he should make the system of government more acceptable to more of his people without repression he will find that not only will there be fewer violent dissents but there will be even more people willing and able to defend the system when it is threatened.
President Biya has a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the world what other African leaders who have been victims of coups have always lamented about "if only there had not been a coup..."
