Our Judicial Band-Aid

       By Joseph M. Ndifor (Opinion Writer)

It’s tough to defend a slush-fund politician. Tougher still is when the defense lawyer is telling Cameroonians that his client, who just came out of a whorehouse about a year ago, is chaste.

At a press conference following Marafa Yaya's arrest in April, his defense lawyer, Professor Ndiva Kofele-Kale, hailed him as a man of “integrity,” a mensch if you will. It turns out his client is a mountebank with enough baggage that, given the national mood against those that have financially bled the country dry, no one would buy his story. In a Mfoundi courtroom on September 22, alongside a phalanx of co-conspirators, Marafa was found guilty of embezzlement, and is now headed for the slammer for twenty five years.

Call these courts, as Cameroonians have derisively described them lately, “mock” or “kangaroo” courts, but we’ve approached a dismal climax—and hence the need for a “Band-Aid,” which may not necessarily be a “cure” —for some judicial direction in the country.

Over the years, some of us have taken swipes at this government, but I find the cynical dismissal by Cameroonians of every court verdict on those that have financially plunged the country into darkness a little disconcerting.

Why? To say that every court verdict—irrespective of the overwhelming evidence against the culprit—carries an element of revenge or political ploy by the judiciary puts a stranglehold on how it might even be reformed. In the Albatross Affair, for instance, billions of CFA got siphoned off the state's coffers by rogue politicians, but here we are, along tribal lines, vouching for the innocence of those implicated in the scam. This issue—goading on those that have plundered the country's resources and hobbled its development—I believe, is the crisis of our time.

Yes, hovering over the arrest and incarceration of these men is an illegitimate president, but if he bequeaths a Cameroon devoid of charlatans like Marafa, Edzoa, Fotso, Nkou, and Fornjindam, so be it. Wouldn’t it be savvy(given our notoriety for widespread corruption) that after court verdicts on corrupt Cameroonians, the rest of the country should take to the streets to demand for more arrests, until the “last” corrupt individual is left for arraignment and incarceration? If Paul Biya is the ultimate target for removal and jail time (as he should be), then Cameroonians can rest assured that the blowback effects of these court verdicts would ultimately hit him.

After all, who would have imagined a few years ago that a Cameroonian minister, let alone a former prime minister, would be incarcerated not for insubordination or casting aspersions on the head of state, but for the financial crime of embezzlement? The hard question now is: having nailed some of these high-profile individuals in recent years, will the court stick to its guns and rein in the president as well? Those flurries of calls from Cameroonians for Biya to declare his assets, an area where his culpability is very apparent, would be the litmus test for the courts in the torturous years ahead. As self-serving as those court verdicts from the Albatross Affair or Operation Sparrow Hawk might appear to Biya, they could, paradoxically, be his undoing.

But the SDF's decision, which allowed a defense team to come to the aid of Marafa over this case, would remain the political blunder of all times. (That SDF decision— the American equivalence of letting current U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder to cross the political aisle and defend Conservative talk radio show host, Rush Limbaugh— would be considered blasphemy by many Democrats!)

The defense team, headed by that political party's Professor Kale, was bound to flounder for a number of reasons: having called for...“more arrests of current and former government ministers who have engaged in the systematic pillaging of national wealth going as far back as the mid-1980's...” in a March 9, 2006 interview with fellow blogger Tande Dibussi, Kale—in the eyes of the judge who presided over this case—presumably appeared a hypocrite for stepping forward to defend a “former government minister,” now charged with money laundering. Even Marafa himself, with his blitz of “open letters,” released to the press at a time when the defense was scrambling to get him off the hook, was not helpful either. Alluding to this barrage of “open letters,” a Cameroonian jokingly remarked that, “He [Marafa] talks too much.”

Finally, anyone who followed the trial could tell that there was a cadaver—my metaphor for the epic collapse of the defense's pending arguments—lying on the highway when the government vultures, looking for what would muddle Marafa's credibility, suddenly circled overhead, bringing news to the defense that they’d reopen (they never did) a five-year-old case between Marafa and the SDF Chairman.

 

 

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Comments

[Ngalla Emmannuel]

Very true, I don't see how someone can rightly defend men Marafa and Inoni knowing how much they've embezzled in the midst of this poverty around the country.