Cameroon: Whose President? (Part II: How Ahmadou Ahidjo Under-Developed Northern Cameroon)

By Jing Thomas

A sophisticated and scholarly people, with a longstanding history of trade, politics, learning and animal husbandry, was lulled to sleep with the narcotics of "balanced development" and its dangerous by-product of favoritism.

In Ahidjo’s native North Cameroon, children were compelled to go to school and all kinds of incentives and inducements were provided, from free books and uniforms to attractive scholarships. It was far easier for a Northerner to join the military, a formidable lever of power, than members of other regions; special entrances, often made simpler to suit northern whims, were reserved for people of this region to gain easy access into most of the professional schools.

It was almost standard practice for many of its businessmen to grab huge loans from banks and some national financial institutions like FONADER with no intention of repaying.

To cap it all, there was a tarred road that linked Garoua to Maroua, the most important Northern cities, at a time when even the national economic capital was not linked to the political one by such a road infrastructure. For good measure, a modern stadium, complete with synthetic grass, for a region that still did not own a division one soccer club, was thrown in.

The official version of this discrimination, for this is what it ultimately degenerated into, one that has been mindlessly regurgitated by people who know very little of Cameroon and tend to depict Ahidjo in angelic light, held that the former president acted because the North was a "disfavored" region that needed to catch up with the rest of the country. A superficial appraisal of the situation may tend to lend some credence to this claim, which in reality has no bearing with the history and sociology of the country.

If Ahidjo's action was to protect a vulnerable people, Idriss Mahamadou, one of Cameroon's greatest scholars on the history of North Cameroon, tells a different story. In a series of very brilliant and interesting articles that were published in Abbia, he has demonstrated the central role trade and education played in the rise of north Cameroonian cities such as Garoua and Maroua.

Long before Western institutions really began to take root along the coast of Cameroon, the north was already reaping the benefits of the trans-Saharan trade that linked Bornou, gateway to Hausaland, to Kano. The Diamare region supplied horses to Sokoto and other parts of northern Nigeria and in turn received a wide range of products from them. With the blossoming of trade came Arabic scholarship and its profusion of koranic schools where instructions, contrary to popular belief, were not confined to religion but also extended to other fields such as grammar, astronomy, poetry and mathematics. This development of trade and scholarship accelerated after the jihads that fastened Fulani grip on North Cameroon and gave rise to an organized administration.

It is a measure of the efficacy of this system of education that led early German administrators to note the propensity of Northerners to grasp and speak Arabic better than the German language. At a time when Islam reigned supreme in the region, the fact that Arabic was the language of the Koran and the prophet was no small inducement

This brief account, depicting the North in full stride ahead of the rest of what became Cameroon in almost every sphere, is ample evidence that Ahidjo perverted his own "balanced development" program. Assuming that he saw development only in Western light, could Fulani children have been more disfavored than those of the "Pygmées?" Rather than balancing, was he not trying to tip the balance in favor of the North? What it amounted to in the end was that a sophisticated and scholarly people, with a longstanding history of trade, politics, learning and animal husbandry, was lulled to sleep with the narcotics of "balanced development" and its dangerous by-product of favoritism.

After Ahidjo's experiment, are the Northerners better off today than the rest of the country? Illiteracy still has a firm hold on the region whose population of the blind, of beggars and armed robbers continue to outstrip the national average. Diseases such as river blindness and meningitis are constant companions. Balanced development indeed!

To be continued...

Comments

[Ma Mary]

Mr Jing: thanks for this series, which puntures the false, glorified revisionist nostalgia about Ahidjo's bloody dictatorship. The theft of resources was just as bad under Ahidjo, except that freelance ripping off was kept under check because Ahidjo was such a control freak. Moreover, people had much lower expectations. As part of Paul Biya's transition, he raised expectations. You also remind people that the Ahidjo-Biya regime is one and the same set of neocolonial genocidaires. The CPDM is really the CNU; many have forgotten.

[Emmaunel Ngang]

Thanks for throwing light into these historical facts.Many Cameroonians think and do so wrongly that Ahijio was a good person.Far from it, he lacked a sense of direction and was only acting to favour the French and some of his kins men.

Biya has continued in the same line .We need leaders who have a vision for Cameroon

Thanks
Emmanuel Ngang