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The SDF Revolution and Counter-Revolutionaries
By Prof. Tazaocha Asonganyi*
* Professor Asonganyi is the Secretary General of the SDF. This well considered write-up was first published in the SDF paper, The Socialist Chronicle of January 11-17, 1999 and again in The Times of November 25-December 5, 1999.
A fundamental condition of liberation is democracy and the abiding culture of human rights. All citizens should have the right to elect freely the government of their choice and the right to freedom of expression and association. Indeed governments should not only be formally based on the will of the people but should be transparent and accountable.
Those who came up with the one party doctrine in Africa, which is cherished by the CPDM regime, were those with the wrong notion that economic progress can be attained through some type of benevolent dictatorship. This notion is not only wrong; it is dangerous. This is because it assumes that some self declared elite could deliver social liberation from on high to a meek and grateful mass that does not participate in its own advancement.
Democracy and development are inter-twined; one cannot be separated from the other. That is why in all struggles for democracy, indeed, in all revolutions, the masses have always been at the centre. It was a mistake for Ahidjo to side tract the masses and create a one party dictatorship to deliver development to them. It is a mistake for Mr. Biya and his regime to continue to entertain a one party dispensation, albeit, under the disguise of a functional multiparty environment one party system and the Cameroonian-type multipartism that has succeeded it have failed to guarantee basic human rights and to ensure effective good governance. Indeed, they refuse the people a say in their own government. They allow tyranny, corruption, indolence fear, and confusion to triumph.
The SDF revolution is about changing for good this unwholesome situation and ushering in a new, healthy, bright, and democratic era in Cameroon. One party practices succeeded because of the disorganization of the people; because the people were left leaderless. There are no real trade unions; civil society is disorganized and virtually non-existent.
The weapon of all revolutionaries is the people. That is why revolutionaries should never lose touch with the people. Card-carrying members of the SDF have confidence in the SDF; but it should always be remembered that this confidence is shared by millions of other Cameroonians who are not members of the SDF. These millions cast their votes for the SDF during elections. They expect us to keep in touch with them; to tell them what we are doing to meet our goals; to listen to their views on what we are doing and what they also want us to do. Some of our greatest critics are from within the ranks of those millions who vote for us. They criticize us in the hope that we can listen to their criticism, get better and more capable of making good the SDF revolution.
The Counter-Revolution
It is often tempting for revolutionary organizations to characterize all opposition to their programmes as acts of counter-revolution. Yet, not all who oppose the programme of a revolutionary organization are counter-revolutionaries. It should always be kept in mind that opposition is an important factor in the contradictory process of change. It is a legitimate expression of human nature.
However, this should not make us lose sight of the dangerous activities of the counter-revolutionaries. Counter-revolution is a combination of forms and aims of actions that are ment to subvert the attainment of the objectives of the organization. Uppermost in the immediate objective of the counter-revolutionary forces is the disorganization, weakening and destruction of the organization. Their aim is to leave the masses without leadership and so open them up to manipulation against their own interests. In the SDF, this has been both within and without its ranks.
Counter-revolution only takes root if there are grievances to exploit whether these grievances are real or are deliberately engineered. That is why to find a playing field within the SDF, these are constant charges of financial mismanagement, tribalism, mrginalisation of some groups within the party, etc. A revolutionary organization like the SDF should remain vigilant and ensue that its own actions and omissions do not assist counter-revolutionaries to find a playing field. Counter-revolutionaries work insidiously and always quickly form networks to create problems where problems do not exist. They do this in order to use them (the networks) as operational tools. To fight against this, revolutionaries should always use transparency and openness to expose the machinations of counter-revolutionaries in order to root out the networks. Further, it should be ensured that the battle of ideas is not set by the counter-revolutionaries.
More importantly, it should always be kept in mind that the best anti-dote to counter-revolution is confidence in the people who must be mobilized always for political action. The people are always capable of crushing any obstacle to their revolution.
One of the charges of the counter-revolutionaries is intolerance. They claim that they are not allowed to talk, to criticize. They say dissent is not allowed. As we have said before, dissent is an integral part of a political party. However, in all serious political parties the world over, party members especially the leaders, never say anything OUTSIDE the structures of the party that will bring the party in disrepute Within the structures of the party it will be foolhardy to sideline critics. A strong leader should always be willing to be surrounded by strong and independent persons who can WITHIN the structures of the movement criticize them in order to improve the contribution of the leader. This ensures that when the leaders go outside the party, their policies and decisions are foolproof and cannot be criticized by anybody.
The problem of counter-revolutionaries within the ranks of the party is that they want to use the national and international press to criticize the party and its leadership. Such criticism outside the structures of the party by members of the party is damaging and gives the impression to the public hat the party is divided and acrimonious. It casts doubt in the mind of the public of the party’s ability to govern. No serious political party accepts this. The SDF does not.
The SDF Revolution
All centers of power in Cameroon including the judiciary are still under the firm control of the CPDM. Judges still discuss with the CPDM the outcome of a court case. Telephone judges, who are rung up by the prosecuting authorities and told what their decision should, be populate the judiciary. In doing this the repressive government and its counter-revolutionary agents use punitive libel laws and imprisonment to muzzle the press and damp revolutionary zeal. It is hoped that imprisoning journalists would conceal the truth and allow the continuation of political repression, organized theft, and dictatorship. It is hoped that imprisoning the people’s revolutionary leaders will deprive the people of their leaders and so leave the one-party practices in place.
It is usually said that when revolutionaries embark on the endless adventure of governing men, they descend to earth and encounter critics. To stem such criticism, the SDF representatives in parliament and in all other centers of power must fulfill the mandate of the party. They should continuously return to the SDF and seek its broad guidance. As a matter of political principle and in our structure and style of operation, there is one SDF; irrespective of many varied sectors in which the cadres are deployed.
That is why there is no Parliamentary SDF; Council SDF, etc. A political party should seek to deploy cadres in all sectors of the society and centres of power in order to influence these centers of power with its ideas and afford it possibilities of patronage. In doing this, there is nothing wrong with advancing cadres who, by their selfless contribution to the cause, defended by the party, deserve acknowledgement. However, this should never lend itself to corrupt practices, which undermine good governance, destroy critical and independent thought and expression and the vibrancy of the party. Corrupt practices create openings for counter-revolutionaries.
Revolution can be violent. But so far, the SDF has used non-violent approaches to the solution of the conflicts in our country without compromising the basic objectives of the struggle. When we have the occasion to discuss with other political forces, we centre the discussion with the aim of achieving our strategic objective of ensuring altenance in Cameroon through the ballot box. We have always analyzed the objective circumstances and the balance of forces, but we have always been aware that these are not carved in stone. The discussions have made us aware that the CPDM regime does not contemplate the possibility of being turned out of office by constitutional means. That is why it continues to insist on establishing forceful political control. This is also, why they continue to be referee and player, political party and electoral commission.
One of the grievances, which counter-revolutionaries make about the SDF, is that there is financial mismanagement in the party. Let us say from the onset that the SDF is a large machinery, which, like some parties need millions of francs per month to keep it going. The SDF has no such money, but because of its popularity of its ideas and values, it enjoyed the services of volunteers who do most of the work that other political parties spend billions to be done.
In conclusion, it should be kept in mind that in each revolution reactionary forces abound. They triumph when they are grievances. When there are no real grievances, they create imagined or imaginary ones, those with a genuine desire for change should always guard against breeding counter-revolutionaries through their actions.
REBUFF: Professor Asonganyi’s Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theology Unplugged
By Ntemfac Aloysius Nkong Ofege
The sensational words, revolution and counter-revolution, are operative in Professor Asonganyi’s write-up. This scribe would want to moderate the SDF scribe’s delusions of grandeur, for the benefit of scholarship and for posterity.
Questions: is the SDF a liberation front? Liberating who from what? Maybe some of the Founding Fathers (Carlson Anyangwe, Albert Mukong) of the SDF thought of using the SDF to liberate the Anglophones (Southern Cameroonians) from annexation by La Republique du Cameroon, but it ended there. Fru Ndi, Mbah Ndam and those now passing around for leaders of the SDF do not see the SDF as affront to liberate Southern Cameroons so there is no liberation agenda here.
Is the SDF a revolutionary movement? Where is the revolution? In parliament? SDF deputies in parliament have simply transformed into ghoulish contractors and blackmailers, arm twisting government ministers for contracts and bribes: when they are not demanding micro-project money which they promptly swindle, that is.
June 5, 2003, SDF parliamentarian stated banging tables in the National Assembly, not so much because they were fighting against the system, but because they wanted the global 1.4400.000.000FCFA micro-project money to be paid forthwith.
Is the SDF a social democratic party or a simplistic political party, warts and all? Is social democracy a revolution? Should dissent, debate, dissent criticism regarding a seemingly democratic movement, albeit one claiming to be different from Mr. Biya’s dictatorship be only within the political party? Are those who share a different view; be they militants, sympathizers, or otherwise regarding the management options and counter-revolutionists? Must they be speedily axed from the party? Must the infamous Article 8-2 dismissing people from the SDF be used with the reckless abandon that Mr. Fru Ndi and his cronies use it?
Must the refuseniks be terrorized intellectually, blackmailed to submission by mass hysteria or by the equally hysteric use of the sonorous word “counter-revolution?"
Nothing short of mass hysteria explains the manner in which Kamdoum, Muna, Siga Asanga, Gabriel Mbock, Souleymane, Maidadi, Fopoussi, Tchwenko and countless others were axed from the SDF or simply withdrawn from the mess out of sheer decency.
August Bebel, the co-founder of the German Social Democratic Party of 1869, said: “Social democracy sees as its aims the establishment of economic equality, in order words, the creation of a state and society based on complete freedom and equality.”
To man According to His Output
The essential vista of the social democratic Agenda is: TO MAN ACCORDING TO HIS OUTPUT, Not to man according to his tribe. Not to man according to his needs. Not to man according to his ability to be a heel-clicking crony or even to man according to his party loyalty.
Social democracy says, to man according to his output, Asonganyi, not to man according to his property or income or business. This is the way it was in the 18th Century Europe. It cannot be different today: neither can it be accepted. To man according to his output, period.
In a purely social democratic system the “we” as a parameter for decision-making and policy takes precedence over the totalitarian “I” so common to puppet dictators, day-dreamers, pint-sized tyrants and recent converts from the CPDM-CNU neo-colonial school of state-sponsored fraud and corruption who wander into a social democratic movement.
We all know that utopian revolutionary Marxism collapsed like a pack of cards leaving those who evolved as social democrats to trundle onwards. The social democrats in Germany, for example, argued that the blend between total democracy and egalitarian social conditions could be achieved systematically: by painstaking and gradual evolution. We now know that the evolutive social democrats have taken over the world, winning elections in Germany, the USA (under Clinton in contrast to the terrorist Bush and his neo-conservative heresy), Sweden, Great Britain, etc. It can thus be said that social democracy came as a comprehensive alternative to Marxism and even then, it is not perfected yet.
From a purely historical perspective, the Marxist Leninists thought that society, especially the exploitative capitalists and savagely capitalistic or globalization societies, could be overthrown by revolutionary fiat. The revolution, they argued, was the necessary first step to emancipation It was these confused revolutionary myths that scared the living daylights out of Western capitalists and chased them away from harmless socialist African states. It was this “terrorist” agenda that led the West to develop a phobia about the likes of Che Guevara who were in reality nothing but harmless socialists and social democrats parading and preaching socialism, democratic socialism but with a gun to back up their religion.
The Marxist totalitarians of old, like Asonganyi of today, shouted revolution but they did not know how to bring about the revolution. They did not even have the means to bring about a revolution. Even when the “mindless mob” controlled the streets and chanted “revolution songs and slogans” the elites, whose leaning towards cowardice is well known, failed to come round to turn the movement into violence. The likes of Asonganyi looked at their ill-gotten positions of privileges and power and disappeared. They thus let the “harmless” booksellers take the rudder and wield to control the movement and steer it in his own direction. Whether or not the direction made sense is a matter of conjecture. Today, the knowledgeable intellectual class is trying to wrest power from the streets. It is not easy.
Inasmuch as democratic socialists parties are mass parties that theoretically provide broad scopes for criticism, the conduct of their affairs is public domain. A democratic party, any democratic party, allows free criticism. Social democrats whose forensic ideology, is to maximize democracy, should rather opt for the clash of ideas and ideas called criticism, irrespective of who is being criticized where, when and why. This is because criticism permits the people to have an increasing say in the way their party and their affairs are being managed. Criticism is rather a measure of the buoyancy of a movement. There is universal awareness that democracy, as a principle of egalitarian equality in decision–making is actually social democracy personified. And, social democracy leaves room for public criticism, which, in the end, makes politics and policy making the outcome of debate and majority, will.
The essential goal of social democracy is that the party and eventually the state should be as democratic as possible. Anything short of that is dictatorship. To put it crassly (and man, as Professor Asonganyi says, being a critic by nature), branding critics, especially those who might want to challenge Prof. Asonganyi’s stewardship of the SDF as counter-revolutionaries, stinks. It could be the quintessential intellectual terrorism at play. If not this could be the mass hysteria and archetypal intolerance present among the lunatic fringe of most populist movements. Also, suggesting that debate and criticisms should only be within limited to slots available to the “debatably “conscious” elite opens the secretary general to suspicion of confusing the plain simple Social Democratic Front to the Soviet communist party in all its transcendental glory.
In the communist contraption, the Central Committee hijacked debates and issued decrees. Where then is the role of the masses if debates are only in the Central Committee (National Executive Committee)? Deriding Mr. Tabetsing’s democratic right (see The Post No 1109) to challenge Mr. Fru Ndi for the SDF leadership would also make Asonganyi a puppet Lenin or Trotsky or any of the ancient Soviet Communist secretary generals.
In a democracy and in a social democracy, only the ballot box decides who is the best man: not the antics of an overzealous scribe deputizing for an unwarranted hatchet man. Is Asonganyi the Independent Electoral commission, what!
The Awesome Revolution
On a more serious note, however, political science (structural functionalism) is very precise about the paradigms of a revolution and its attendant counter-revolution. The dictionary defines a revolution as: “ a swift, often violent change in constitutions that ushers in a new era.” We can always recognize a revolution when we see one. “A revolution is a comprehensive, radical forceful and often total upheaval of social conditions in the short term.”
Murtala Mohammed operated a revolution in Nigeria inside six months. In 1989, a revolution, in its awesome glory happened in France. Nicholai Ceaucescu was toppled by a revolution in Rumania. What the SDF had done so far is to force something like multipartism in Cameroon. The rest is history. The present SDF has no radical, revolutionary change to offer Cameroonians. The current SDF leadership is not even principled enough or knowledgeable enough to end the neo-colonial state in Cameroon simply because the SDF is itself a neo-colonial creation or functions like a neo-colonial contraption.
There is no way the forceful insertion of another party within a neo-colonial dispensation can be called a revolution. What obtains in Cameroon today is legalized multipartism not even a democracy; not even social democracy, let alone a democracy and social democracy imposed by revolutionary fiat. For one thing, having, inadvertently, absorbed the SDF shock thanks to the cupidity of its leadership, the neocolonial state in Cameroon is still cruising along with its corrupt neo-colonial practices. In fact, the so-called “children of the revolution” have now become as corrupt as the system they set out to change! How can Asonganyi and Fru Ndi, who haven’t a clue what Social democracy is all about seek to teach Cameroonians what they knoweth not?
As a motivation for political behaviour, a revolution goes beyond the simplistic rejection of an establishment, a system, and the status quo. In a revolution, the establishment and the system are rejected in a MILITAN WAY. One cannot reject the neo-colonial state in Cameroon by day only to wine, dine, and take money from the same system and its incarnators by night. No revolutionary movement will denounce the councils and parliament and the government as being rigged, corrupt, incompetent and underachieving in broad daylight and still be part of the same councils, parliament while seeking ways to join the same government in the same broad daylight.
A revolution cannot adapt. It cannot cohabit. It cannot even tolerate the system it set out to abolish because the very nature does not permit that. In other words a revolutionary movement will not even touch with the evolutionary processes of going into councils and parliament even as a stopgap measure. Some years ago Mr. Fru Ndi sonorously announced that he was sending his parliamentarians into parliament to cause an upheaval and a revolution in parliament. Years later…
Revolutionary movements are principled gung-hoes. They are never over shadowed by vile capitalists, petty traders and grade z politicians who foist their self-seeking attitudes on the mindless mob whose affairs they mismanage. And when these carpetbaggers and thieves are criticized, they shout: Counter-revolution. Revolutionary and liberation movements are usually one agenda movements; never a giant basket of crabs with every Golgi-eyed Spaniel crab going their own way and seeking their own ends: Mbah Ndam this way, Asonganyi the other way.
P.J. Vatikiotis (PJ) says it so well when he proclaims that: “the metastatic soteriological (and revolutionary politics) abhor adaptations, for how else can it eschew the difficulties; ignore and bypass the obstacles presented by the complex biological and psychological dimension of man, or mesmerize man’s subtle, though limited, and vulnerable rationality” How can the revolutionary foist is search for Utopia on simple minds if not by force?
Revolutionaries always pontificate about the resplendescence of a future to be attained, possible in their dreams. They always promise to build bridges where there are no rivers and generally try to invent the wheel. Social democracy only tries to grant maximum democracy even within its own setting.
Albert Camus (The Rebel. P. 61) says that because this gloriously euphoric paradise cannot be attained it must be justified. And it ends there. In other words, politics to the revolutionary is not a question of beliefs or even religious beliefs but something else. The revolution demands fanaticism from all its adherents. The revolution and all its attendant swansongs become the watchword as a gung-ho of newfound angels tries to reinvent the world by pseudo-divine fiat. A revolution is not democratic. It is no social democratic. It is base tyranny in its most vile form. And those who denounce the pseudo-revolutionaries are plain critics; counter-revolutionaries. Off with their heads! Down with the intellectuals! Article 8-2!
In its final outtake, a revolution destroys the status quo, spirit, antics and attitude, warts and all. It strives to create a new world. That is why a rebellion kills men while a revolution destroys both men and principles. All revolutionary theology is a rape of man’s rationale and biological make up. That is why the Almighty God in his infinite wisdom, never opted to invent humanity and his structures thereof by a sonorous revolutionary process. Instead, God opted for an evolution.
Any revolutionary theology is viciously methodical, merciless, marauding, meticulous in its metastatic aims. It even creates substitutes for reality. How meticulous is the SDF? How methodic? How merciless?
Professor Asonganyi is only a harmless, albeit, two-timing, medical professor. He knoweth not the frightsome detail of a revolution. He does not even know the sophisticated evolution of man: from Absolutism to the Industrial revolution; to Capitalism/Communism; to Revisionism, to Democracy and to Social Democracy. If Asonganyi, a professor, with his “confort intellectuel” does not understand social democracy, and revolutionary theology, what more of Fru Ndi?
Knowing the intellectual mien of those who put the SDF statutes together, these worthy gentlemen, were, and still are, for a more germane, more humane, more relevant and more attainable goal of maximum democracy and equal opportunities for Cameroon and all Cameroonians. Not the far out revolution being prescribed by Asonganyi. In fact, the JJcs into the SDF, who have hijacked the party and are using it to satisfice their greed and avarice have a vested interest in branding critics as counter-revolutionaries.
And, consequently, were one to view it as a matter of causality (causes and effects) with the same causes producing the same effects, the Cameroonian situation would be the quintessence of what we are talking about: God’s processes at work: N’en deplaisse aux oiseaux de mauvais augur, as the Best Pupil, Mr. Biya would say. In1982, Mr. Biya wandered into power. Between 1983-date, the buoyant economy and the vast reserves legated to Mr. Biya by Mr. Ahidjo were incinerated in one of the most fluid extravaganza this side of the Great Divide. At about the same time, the structural-functional paradigm of the one-party state as a feedback lop between a government dominated by a pretentious elite, and a disparate and desperate populace craving for attention. Asonganyi agrees with this.
The IMF/World Bank cabal also wandered in with its habitual antics of foisting telescopic and designed-to-fail macro-economic modules on a population already recoiling from a very bad governance. It was during that euphoria that the SDF was born, first as a front to bring change, then cause democracy, good governance, and accountability in Cameroon. Equal opportunities and the Federal character as guarantees to make sure that the SDF delivers. The above identity card was even a deviation from the original script, which said the SDF was out to solve the Anglophone problem. The SDF was, has been and continuous to operate as a simplistic political party, catering for the interest and upward mobility of its members whose agenda-setting members are a gung-ho of small businessmen, retired civil servants, petty traders contractors and shallow-minded intellectuals. Unfortunately. The SDF is not Professor Asonganyi’s pretentious, spurious, and sonorous revolutionary party.
Had the SDF been a revolution, 14 years later Mr. Biya would not still be parading around in abject arrogance. Had the SDF been a revolution, the bunch of pretentious SDF cretins garnering crumbs and contracts from the regime in parliament and the councils while pretending to represent the masses, would have been decently tied to the stakes and decently shot.
Fourteen (14) years later corruption constitutional violation, graft, tribalism, nepotism, clientelism, gross incompetence that the SDF set out to destroy are right there within the doorsteps of the same SDF and destroying the SDF. The tail s now wagging the dog as the real Cameroonian revolution (Corruption and Dictatorship) threatens to eat its own children.
A.T. Hatto (alias AT) so beautifully circumscribes the essential Cameroonian dilemma between the dubious and evolutive gradualist Biya, and the meek SDF revolutionary poise, hyped with soporific alacrity by fellows like Asonganyi: “Evolution inhuman affairs,” says AT "like evolution in the Cosmos applies to changes in time whether fast or slow but revolution is swift and total.”
And man, like Asonganyi, being a pretender always reaches out for sismian, neurotic and orgasmic excitability badly needs a glamourous, glitzy, sci-fi term for swift, sudden change, which he un-philosophically calls REVOLUTION. The REVOLUTION: because it sounds BIG. Even when he knows that he does neither have the intellectual capacity, nor the material means, nor the human resources to bring about a revolution, man still bawls REVOLTION with all his puny might.
HYPE. HYPE SIR! The trouble with hype, however, is that, in the long term, and after several failures to deliver the revolution with its promised paradise, a serious movement (and the SDF ought to be a serious movement) can be made its illusionists to look like a storm in a teacup: clowns parading, toothless bulldogs on display, asses braying very loudly as Mr. Biya presides and the CPDM neocolonial calvcade rolls on to nowhere. Without being a subscriber to the fatalistic logic that all power (including Mr. Biya’s) comes from God and that if God does not build the House the labourers toil in vain, although those are the facts, I would submit that the processes of impending, very close to, and failed change in Cameroon, offer interesting reading to students of politics and political science, structures and functions.
Professor Asonganyi is correct. People get fatigued, bored when change does not come and fast but whether we like it or not evolution brings about a slow but fundamental change. In fact, the essential vista of change, not through violence but through the ballot box that is now policy in the SDF, means that the SDF has nicely fitted itself into the evolutive not the revolutionary stance.
The epanastasis (uprising) in Herodotus’ terms has failed. Exeunt the Sovereign National Conference. Exeunt the Constitutional Reforms. Exeunt the mass rallies as the movement deteriorates into a timocracy (of cowards), then an oligarch (of a few) and then a tyranny: a tyranny wherein Mr. Fru Ndi is left alone staring and quarrelling with the walls of his bedroom and imagining what might have been: a tyranny where harmless critics and asses braying are called Counter-revolutionaries by Asonganyi. Those who know that the end of the process of failed change (see Samuel Huntington) is decay and who are fighting to make sure that this does not happen to the almighty SDF are totally delightfully and gleefully tagged counter-revolutionaries by the neat bunch of balloon heads now misleading the SDF and dripping with fats and oils from Mr. Biya’s high table of bribery and corruption.
Cameroonians cannot invent the wheel, the semantics of a revolution have been with man since God blasted the Earth after Lucifer’s rebellion and put Lucifer and his evil spirits in darkness. The fact is that the SDF long ago lost grip of its initial momentum and methodical metastasis, which demanded an almost fanatical adherence to party options. The change and revolutionary movement of yore has now given birth in awesome glory to its own oligarchy (conservatives) representing its own resistance to change. This status quo seeks to preserve ill-gotten positions of privileges and property tooth and nail and by hook or by crook. The drama in Cameroon today is that the apathy observed about the SDF has nothing to do with battle fatigue. Many have realized that it was all hot air; attempts by baboons to replace chimpanzees. The mob is no longer mindless. Would those who now point out the foibles of the “revolution” and either criticize it or fail to contribute to the upkeep of a neo business class reaping where they never sowed, be counter-revolutionaries? Dites le moi, Professeur.
The truth about the matter is even that for those in the centre like Asonganyi, liberation and revolutionary theology depends in expression and communication upon intellectual and actual terrorism: Intimidate and terrorize Bernard Muna inside an election Convention in Douala, Send a Hit Squad after Souleymane in Yaounde, Make phone calls to threaten Tchwenko in Bamenda with Death, write crappy articles on revolutions and counter-revolutions in the papers and generally intimidate and blackmail.
To the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the center, politics is no longer the quest for conflict resolution, no longer the healer, no longer therapeutic but actually cathartic. Politics no longer limits its agenda to the treatment of uncertainties of societies checkered existence but politics becomes the survival of the fittest (Darwinism) and WAR. In this fading Camelot, politics demands adherence at all costs to prefixed positions: no criticisms, no questions. This is not Social democracy. This is totalitarianism. It is glorified Asonganyism.
I would posit that the hybristic perception of the liberation of man from want through political means, the craving for change in Cameroon through social democracy id felt by ALL CAMEROONIANS. Perhaps even more by those in the CPDM than those in the SDF. The trouble preventing that yearning to be crystallized into the ultimate weapon is, I believe, deviant theologies being passed around by fellows like Asonganyi that the SDF is a violent revolutionary, communist, terrorist, movement. A revolutionary movement would just act: not make noise.
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