Peeking Beneath the Veil of the Albatross: Why Inoni and Marafa are in Jail

By Dibussi Tande

Even though it was not completely unexpected, the arrest of  Chief Inoni Ephraim, former Prime Minister and Head of Government, and Hamidou Marafa Yaya, former Minister of State in Charge of Territorial Administration and Decentralization, is a bombshell that is still reverberating across the Cameroonian political landscape.

According to reports by the State-owned CRTV, both men had showed up at the offices of investigative judge Pascal Magnaguemabe for what was expected to be a routine encounter, but were instead bundled off to the Kondengui Maximum security prison in the latest chapter of the decade-long probe into the Albatross Affair, or the botched attempt to purchase a brand new aircraft for President Biya – a dizzying fall from grace of two “golden boys” of the Biya regime who were once considered (particularly in the case of Marafa) potential heirs to the octogenarian Paul Biya.

So what exactly was the role of the former Prime Minister and former Minister of State in the Albatross affair? We will attempt make sense out of a complex, multifaceted, and convoluted case characterized by sensational accusations and counter-accusations, and widespread belief that politics, rather than justice, has been the driving force behind it all.

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Comments

[J. S. Dinga]

Fantastic Tande Dibussi! Just wonderful! The butterfly effect states that a butterfly flaps its wings in far away Indonesia and generates a small current which grows in magnitude till it becomes a tsunami, wrecking hamlets, villages, towns, cities, megalopolises and moore. Here is a Cameroonian butterfly effect unfolding. Just because a very corrupt president wants at all costs to acquire a luxury aircraft well beyond his country's means, he mobilizes henchmen to do his bidding, remote-controling them to do everything to avoid incuring the wrath of the World Bank and IMF, the main organs toying to get the Banana Republic/AK-47 democracy out of insolvency.Innocent persons will suffer along with the coterie of corrupt ones. And now Transparency International can have the last laugh. And Lord Acton dictum is proved correct once again, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Poor Cameroon!

[The Ngwa Man]

Mr Tande this is damn good coverage of this topic. Thank you for putting all of this together for our consumption & understanding. In my opinion, S.E. Biya must be IMPEACHED because this Albatros scandal is a result of his attempts to secretly & inappropriately use state funds to purchase a private plane. The big picture about all of this is that Mr Biya has clearly implicated himself thus confirming the illegitimacy & illegality of his presidency once again. Only in pays can a thief report his accomplieces to the courts for stealing items from him that he himself has stolen & escape justice. The opposants in parliament should table a bill calling on the impeachment of Mr Biya from office. We all know that it most likely will not gain traction in the CPDM dominated Assembly but it will symbolically show the courage of the opposant MPs standing for justice & the rule of law against their CPDM colleagues. Biyacracy is a failed system which has benefited one man at the expense of all. Ironically it has proven to be dangerous & unfair to those that have enabled the sole beneficiary to remain in power till death do us part. Ha ha ha!