Opinions of Saturday, 9 July 2016

Auteur: Bouddih Adams

Roughshod:Teachers,retirees to end up in prison

If the bill on tenancy finally sails through and is promulgated into Law, ENS graduates and retirees will all end up in prison.

Take, for instance, the fact that teachers that leave training are posted to faraway places and go for, at least, two years before their salaries start coming.

Consider that the new law on tenancy says that a landlord should drag his tenant to court after two months of non-payment of rents. Will all the young teachers not end up in prison?

On the other hand, retirees suffer for four to five years before their pensions start coming. Those who are still renting will also all end up in prison.

The proposed law is the handiwork of government ministers who have, all, one way or the other stolen the people’s money and constructed houses which they let to the Cameroonian people that have been impoverished and will ever remain tenants.

Yet these government ministers want to throw them in prison if they fail to pay rents.

But, have they built enough prisons to contain the people who will all be convicted for non-payment of rents? No. So, where are they going to put all these people?

A wise person would, first, build a barn before the harvest. Even our illiterate grandmothers back in the villages build their barns before the harvest season.

If these government officials were not blinded by their very graft and greed, they should have started by building huge prisons, especially as the existing dungeons are overcrowded.

If not, it would finally only be logical for them to erect a huge fence round the Cameroons to serve as prison, while the regime seeks refuge in the few prisons that are there now.

Good laws should protect the common man – the poor and hapless – but the law in the Cameroons always seeks to protect the rich and powerful. I was still contemplating this when I learned that the same blokes shamelessly drafted the law seeking immunity for themselves. That is when I said; “Yo-wa! They have finally arrived.”

This, willy-nilly, indicates that they are realising that the people are getting angrier by the day, as they are being impoverished more and more. The thieving habit of the regime is evidenced by the fact that an entire government is in Kondengui, only waiting for one man to make the cabal complete, hence, they are seizing the law to protect themselves from the irate Cameroonian people.

Like my friend would say, their Lord has been moving their ministry until it is finally going into the direction where it should go. So, the spirit moving their ministry has been the force driving the non-application of Article 66 of the 1996 Constitution on the declaration of assets, for government officials before they assume office.

For anyone to have sat down and drafted that bill for immunity for government ministers, and have the courage to send it to Parliament, betrays the fact that the ministers are so desperate, which, in turn, betrays the fact that they all have soiled hands.

This, at the same time and otherwise, confirms assertions that the arrest, incarceration and imprisonment of some members of government, or politicians, is just a smokescreen or political scape-goatism.

Again, how can almost an entire cabinet be in prison, most of whom were contemporary members of government when they were alleged to have stolen the money they are imprisoned for, and the ones who are not yet in prison are seeking immunity against prosecution by the very judicial authorities and system that tried their colleagues and collaborators and imprisoned them. I hope you see the punch line here.

The arrogance with which the people who thought about and drafted that bill were pregnant with, is equal to telling the Cameroonian poor masses that: “If you don’t like it, you can go to hell.”
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