If there’s anyone who understands Albert Einstern’s dictum that ‘A problem cannot be solved with the same level of knowledge that individuals had at the time the problem was created’, then it is President Paul Biya, who immediately he discovered former Prime Minister Yang Philemon was running out of ideas on how to resolve the current Anglophone problem, he immediately brought in the more level-headed Dion Ngute, purveyor of ideas par excellence and traditional ruler who masters the trappings of grassroots politics and traditional diplomacy.
Proof positive of PM Dion Ngute’s agility is that in less than three years of his stay at the Priemature he has visited the North West and the South West and communed with the grassroots at least two times more than former PM Yang, who, since the outbreak of the crisis, never set foot on South West soil, and whom everyone concludes his intransigence brought us to where we are today
firstly, by refusing to receive Common Law lawyers from the two English speaking regions who sort audience with him in 2015 under the leadership of Barrister Bobga Harmony and secondly, inadvertently not urging the Higher Education Minister in the run up to 2016 events, to give a listening ear to Anglophone Teachers Trade Unions, who were threatening that if an end was not brought to the harmonization of the two subsystems if education, hell would be let lose.
When GK Thesterton wrote that each time the world was in crisis the need for great men rose up, he was certainly anticipating the complex anglophone crisis and the rise to the scene of decision-making of the likes of Dr. Dion Ngute, current Prime Minister, Head of Government, who, even though coming to the scene at the heat of crisis, has been fast in fast-tracking confidence-building measures between the governed and the government.
If there’s anybody within the Cameroon stakeholdership today who understands President Biya’s September 22, 2017 speech at the UN General Assembly that he is a ‘beggar of peace’, it is PM Dion Ngute, who since taking over office understands that one cannot be a beggar of peace by sitting in the cozy confines of offices in Yaounde, but rather, that such a person needs to be down field, communioning with market women as he did during his first visit to Bamenda in 2019.
With a higher level of consciousness about the urgency for a solution to the conflict ragging the two English speaking regions since 2016, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute would go the extra mile and spend the extra hour fashioning out an all-inclusive solution to the Anglophone problem. Unlike Yang who preferred to delegate powers to his Director of Cabinet to handle the initial consultations with Common Law lawyers and Teachers Trade Unions in Bamenda, Dr. Joseph Dion Ngute since becoming Prime Minister has been directly handling all the consultations, and across the board.
If the Prime Minister is again on the field to further consult with the grassroots as a logical follow-up to the 2019 Major National Dialogue it is because of his in-depth understanding of the medical principle which holds that ‘a disease adequately diagnosed is halfway treated. Anything could be said about the PM by detractors and those who want Cameroon divided, but history records that it was during his stay at the Prime Ministry that a Major National Dialogue on the Anglophone Problem in Cameroon was held, with him as national Coordinator and Felix Mbayu as Rapporteur.
It may take time for the fruits of the 2019 MND to be visible, it may look like government has lost its compass in handling the mounting security challenges in the two English speaking regions, anger may seem to still be boiling over into the streets, separatist fighters may currently seem to be giving government forces a run for their money, yet the future is hopefully and decidedly brighter, especially as the open-minded Dion Ngute is constantly in search of a systematic framework in which unionists and independentists could peacefully coexist in a one Cameroon, not because its indivisible but because it is good and beautiful for sons and daughters of this country to live together.
