The Secretary General of the Cameroon Teachers Trade Union, CATTU, Tassang Wilfred, has said 2018 will be a delicate year for Cameroon.

He made this declaration while talking to Eden.

“Let me tell you that 2018 is a very delicate year for Cameroon. It is a year that you would call in French “l’annee de tout les dangers” because we have all the elections in this country. We in the civil society are preparing for 2018 because we want to see change,” Tassang said.

“We have all the laws; what we need in Cameroon is change of people at various levels of the state. We think that the government is using this terrorism law to frighten the people into more apathy and we ask the government to be careful because there will come a time when everything will turn around as a boomerang, then we may not be able to gather the pieces,” he warned.

Talking on security threats and the recent law on terror, the CATTU Secretary General said “our country is seriously threatened by terrorists; Boko Haram and we don’t know who else are on the way coming. Laws come to address a situation; terrorists are attacking every other country, so Cameroon truly really needs to prepare for this eventuality.

But we think what the government really needs to do as a matter of urgency is to address the causes that would want people to attack institutions of the state, kidnap people and kill people. The root causes are poverty, and the government needs to address this. But our fear in the civil society is that the government is using Boko Haram as a stepping stone to prepare and to clamp down on citizens who may want to revindicate their rights”.

“Let me give you this little analogy; in 1990 when SDF was launched and multipartyism reinstituted in Cameroon, between 1990-1992, this country went through everything that every other country went through and had change and nothing happened,” he stated, adding that “people spoke, people wrote in newspapers and there were newspapers that survived and people made wealth out of sales because there were no adverts.

But today we have come to the situation of apathy where no body seems to believe that anything good can happen in this country any more. We have come to a situation where people have given up; we have come to the situation where people have surrendered. They think that if you cannot beat them, join them and Cameroonians in the vast majority have joined the evil that they used to criticize and condemn yesterday”.

To Tassang Wilfred, what Cameroonians need in 2015 is to get closer to God. He said “What I want to see change in 2015 is that Cameroonians should get closer to God and let God take over this country because it has been proven that on our own strength, we cannot do anything,” he posited.