Daily Archives: March 21, 2017

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English-speaking Cameroonians of the Southwest and Northwest regions have a unique historical experience in the country. In the referendum of 1961 the region, previously under U.N.-mandated British trusteeship, voted to reunite with the French-speaking Republique du Cameroun to form a two-state federation. In 1972, contrary to strict constitutional provisions, the countrys first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, orchestrated a referendum that changed the governing system into a unitary state with ensuing hyper-centralization of decision-making in Yaounde, the nations capital. Twelve years later, President Paul Biya, now 84 years old and in his 35th year of power, changed the countrys name from the United Republic of Cameroon back to the Republic of Cameroon, further alienating the Anglophones who were already being seen and treated as second-class citizens.

Cameroon today suffers from entrenched poor governance across all sectors, but the Anglophone marginalization is particularly pronounced. Of the 36 government ministers who control departmental budgets, only one is an Anglophone. Despite constitutional stipulations, the use of English barely exists in government administration. French-speaking teachers who barely understand English are sent to teach in Anglophone regions. Magistrates trained in French civil law, with no knowledge of the English language, are sent to administer the law to an English-speaking population that practices British common law. Anglophone teacher trade unions as well as lawyers have vehemently opposed this government-driven francophonisation of their communities. It is not the first time they have protested, but this time the challenge is different. Today, the entire Anglophone population is irate and speaks with one voice.

The governments response to the peaceful protests and civil disobedience has been true to its Jacobin teaching of total repression: the arrest of Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium leaders who are now accused of acts of subversion punishable by death; the arbitrary arrest of more than 110 English-speaking Cameroonians; the curtailing of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech; and the alleged rape and torture of university students by some members of the security forces. Many Anglophones have been killed and many others have fled the country. In an act of desperation, the government has shut down the Internet to the English-speaking regions, for two months now, as a last resort in preventing the spread of civil disobedience to the French-speaking regions.

The fight against the Islamic sect Boko Haram in the three northern regions, as well as the very porous borders in the East region with the Central African Republic, have created an extremely tenuous security situation. Conflict in the Northwest and Southwest means six of the 10 regions will face security challenges. National revenues and foreign exchange have dropped significantly in recent years, driven by low oil and commodity prices worldwide. There is growing pressure from the International Monetary Fund to devalue the currency and will likely result in the implementation of austerity measures that would undoubtedly be opposed by the predominantly young population. For a country with 62 percent of its population under the age of 25, this potential demographic dividend is far from being achieved.

The politics of fear and iron-fisted rule, a government specialty, has been completely crushed by Anglophones with Francophones taking full notice. State-citizen relations have been dramatically altered in a way similar to that of East Germany just before it collapsed in 1989. It is becoming increasingly questionable whether elections scheduled for 2018 will be possible.

Cameroon faces a historic opportunity to transform itself into a pluralistic, democratic, broad-based market economy where diversity is at the core of its raison dtre. It can choose to be a country where open, frank debates are celebrated, as demonstrated in Ghana, not one where countless presidential decrees are the norm. A federalist governing system, perhaps a 10-state federation, is the surest way to resolve these crises while simultaneously enhancing national unity and well-being. Cameroonians must continue to fight for this. Will the Biya government see the writing on the wall or will it, by being incapable of changing, continue down its repressive path with the consequences that abound?

Foretia is co-chair of the Denis & Lenora Foretia Foundation and a senior fellow at the Nkafu Policy Institute.

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Cameroon continues its oppression of English speakers - Albuquerque Journal

Its been 54 years since Kenya got her independence and yet there are still a number of archaic, colonial and discriminatory laws on the statute books. From archival research I have done its clear that these laws are used to exploit, frustrate and intimidate Kenyans by restricting their right to movement, association and the use of private property.

They also make it difficult for ordinary Kenyans to make a living by imposing steep permit fees on informal businesses.

These laws were inherited from the colonial British government and used to be within the purview of local government municipalities under the Local Government Act. This act was repealed when municipalities were replaced by counties after the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution.

Currently, these laws are contained in county rules and regulations, criminalising a good number of activities, including making any kind of noise on the streets, committing acts contrary to public decency, washing, repairing or dismantling any vehicle in non-designated areas (unless in an emergency) and loitering aimlessly at night.

The colonial laws served a central purpose segregation. Africans and Asians could be prosecuted for doing anything that the white settlers deemed to be a breach of public order, public health or security.

Violating human rightsMany of these archaic laws also restrict citizens use of shared or public space. Some of them grant the police powers to arrest offenders without warrant, and to prosecute them under the Penal Code.

Offences like the ones mentioned above are classified as petty crimes that can attract fines and prison terms.

Some have argued that these laws are being abused because they restrict freedom of movement and the right to a fair hearing.

A few of them also hinder the growth of the economy. For example, hawking without a permit is against the law. To get a permit, traders must pay steep fees to various government authorities. This requirement is a deterrent to trade and infringes on the social economic rights of citizens.

Another example is the law that makes it a crime to loiter at night. This law was initially put on the books to deter people from soliciting for sexual favours, or visiting unlicensed establishments. It has however become a means for state agents to harass anyone walking on the streets at night.

Genesis of archaic lawsThe laws can be traced back to legal ordinances that were passed by the colonial government between 1923 and 1934.

The 1925 Vagrancy (Amendment) Ordinance restricted movement of Africans after 6pm, especially if they did not have a registered address.

Post-independence, the ordinance became the Vagrancy Act, which was repealed in 1997. The Vagrancy Act inspired the Public Order Act, which restricts movement of Africans during the day, but only in the special circumstances that are outlined in the Public Security (Control of Movement) Regulations.

The Witchcraft Ordinance of 1925, which formed the basis for the Witchcraft Act, outlawed any practices that were deemed uncivilised by colonial standards. The provisions of the Act are ambiguous and a clear definition of witchcraft is not given. This has made it easy for authorities to prosecute a wide range of cultural practices under the banner of witchcraft.

Rationale behind punitive lawsThe idea behind most of the targeted legislation enacted by the colonialists was to separate whites from people of other races, including Asians. For example, in 1929 settlers in the white suburbs of Muthaiga in Nairobi raised an objection when the Governor announced plans to merge their suburban township with greater Nairobi.

That would have meant that they would have had to mingle with locals from Eastleigh and other native townships, which were mostly black. As a caveat to joining the greater Nairobi Township, the Muthaiga Township committee developed standard rules and regulations to govern small townships.

These rules and regulations were applied to other administrative townships such as Mombasa and Eldoret.

White townships would only join larger municipalities if the Muthaiga rules applied across the board.

The Muthaiga rules allowed white townships to control and police public space, which was a clever way to restrict the presence and movement of Asians and Africans in the suburbs.

Variations of these rules remain on the books to date. The current Nairobi county rules and regulations require residents to pay different rates to the county administration depending on their location.

In addition, the county rules demand that dog owners must be licensed, a requirement that limits the number of city dwellers who can own dogs. This rule can be read as discriminatory because the vast majority of lower-income earners now find themselves unable to keep a dog in the city. Indeed, discrimination was the basis of the colonial legal framework.

Can oppressive laws be legal?Strictly speaking, these discriminatory rules and regulations were unlawful because they were not grounded in statutory or common law. Indeed, they were quasi-criminal and would have been unacceptable in Great Britain.

Ironically, because such rules and regulations didnt exist in Great Britain, criminal charges could not be brought against white settlers for enforcing them.

To curtail freedom of movement and enjoyment of public space by non-whites the settlers created categories of persons known as vagrants, vagabonds, barbarians, savages and Asians.

These were the persons targeted by the loitering, noisemaking, defilement of public space, defacing of property, and anti-hawking laws. The penalty for these offences was imprisonment.

Anyone found loitering, anyone who was homeless or found in the wrong abode, making noise on the wrong streets, sleeping in public or hawking superstitious material or paraphernalia would be detained after trial.

Police had the powers to arrest and detain offenders in a concentration camp, detention or rehabilitation centre, or prison without a warrant.

This is the same legal framework that was inherited by the independence government and the very same one that has been passed down to the county governments.

The Public Order Act allows police powers to arrest without warrant anyone found in a public gathering, meeting or procession which is likely to breach the peace or cause public disorder. This is the current position under sections 5 and 8 of the Act.

This law, which was used by the colonial government to deter or disband uprisings or rebellions, has been regularly abused in independent Kenya.

At the end of the day Kenyans must ask themselves why successive governments have allowed the oppression of citizens to continue by allowing colonial laws to remain on the books.

Mercy Muendo, Lecturer, Information Technology and the Law, Mount Kenya University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Kenyans are still oppressed by archaic colonial laws - Mail & Guardian Africa

WikiLeaks uncovers the U.S. police state

By Mark Luedtke

All hail Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks. No scribe in history has dared expose the machinations of rulers to the extent Assange has. A hero in every respect, including his flaws, Assange sacrifices his freedom and risks his life to inform people of the evils of coercive government.

Assange could not accomplish this mission on his own. All members of WikiLeaks and the whistleblowers who feed them are heroes.

WWII was presented to the American people as a conflict between an open society and a closed one. Rulers contrasted how Americans enjoyed the free exchange of ideas without surveillance or consequence while fascist countries were ruled by secret police that monitored everything. The communists employed the same tactic during the Cold War.

The book They Thought They Were Free documents how Germans believed they were free until the Nazis made it clear they werent. They had surrendered their freedom before the Nazis took power, and then the Gestapo ruled them. The KGB ruled the Soviet Union.

We recently learned Americans are ruled by our own secret police: the NSA, FBI, and, as WikiLeaks spectacularly documented, the CIA. Americans who believe they are free are as mistaken as the Germans before them.

Of course, Americans have never been allowed the free exchange of ideas without surveillance or consequence. George Washington read every piece of mail he could confiscate during the Revolutionary War and the revolts during his presidency. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were forced to write essays protesting oppression under pseudonyms. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imprisoned newspaper writers who criticized him and his war against Southern states. Roosevelt imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent. War is the impetus for oppression.

However, despite the governments efforts, Americans largely succeeded in keeping society open. Thats why the best and brightest people in the world moved to America, especially during the rise of fascism between the world wars. The openness of American society was one of the major factors in winning WWII and the Cold War.

But not any more. The WikiLeaks expos proves beyond a shadow of a doubt all Americans are now monitored and controlled by secret police.

The first important takeaway from this WikiLeaks dump is U.S. government agents will go to any extreme to hack anybody they want. The law does not limit them. They are not limited by conscience. They follow their worst instincts without consequence. Promoting changes to the law to limit U.S. spies is useless, because they dont obey the law.

Second, government agents intentionally make the internet less secure. Rhetoric about wanting to secure the internet is a joke. Rulers spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually making it less secure so we are more vulnerable to internet predators.

Exile Edward Snowden tweeted, If youre writing about the CIA/WikiLeaks story, heres the big deal: first public evidence USG secretly paying to keep U.S. software unsafe.

Snowden continues, The CIA reports show the USG developing vulnerabilities in US products, then intentionally keeping the holes open. Reckless beyond words.

Surrendering power to the U.S. government, ostensibly to secure the internet, is setting the fox to guard the henhouse.

WikiLeaks CIA document dump also shows how U.S. spies regularly create fake intelligence and masquerade as rival intelligence services, so the next time you hear Russian or Chinese hackers hacked something, you cant trust it. Fake intelligence from the U.S. government, especially the CIA, is the primary source of the fake news that permeates the mainstream media.

Its ironic that despite all its tools for creating fake intelligence, the CIA produced zero evidence Russia hacked the recent presidential election. Its outrageous that America, once the haven for the best and brightest people in the world, now has a government that drives productive Americans to expatriate in record numbers.

I fear for Julian Assange. WikiLeaks has been so successful that Sean Hannity, who never saw a war or spy program he didnt like, is suddenly talking about the danger of the deep state. The last person to so publicly wound the CIA was President Kennedy, and he was assassinated for it.

Assange is already trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, but the Ecuadorians cant protect him from the CIA. I fear hell either be extradited or assassinated by years end. Hopefully, WikiLeaks will continue doing the job American establishment reporters wont do if the worst happens to Assange.

The views and opinions expressed in Conspiracy Theorist are the views and/or opinions of the author and do not reflect the views and/or opinions of the Dayton City Paper or Dayton City Media and are published strictly for entertainment purposes.

Tags: conspiracy theorist, headline, surveillance, U.S. police state, WikiLeaks

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Conspiracy Theorist: 3/21 - Dayton City Paper

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Its budget-whiner season again and progressive big-government gadflies are swarming around President Trumps proposed budget cuts like the buzzing blood sucking pests that drive arctic caribou herds and humans to literal madness in the Great White North.

It is pernicious progressive political propaganda that any attempt to downsize the federal government is somehow evidence of President Trumps putative penchant for fascism. Dystopian author George Orwell said of fascism It is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword. But shriek fascism as a swearword the pettifogging panderers of political profligacy do at the slightest suggestion that the federal government is too large and costs too much, despite the inherent idiocy and hypocrisy of suggesting that smaller government is somehow fascistic.

Circumspectly, fascism is to political polarity as religion is to theocratic polarity. Religion is how you go about practicing your religious beliefs, not the beliefs themselves. In the same way fascism is how you go about achieving your political goals, not what your political beliefs are. You can be a Buddhist or a Baptist and youre still practicing religion. Likewise, you can be a Socialist or a Conservative and still be a practicing fascist. Therefore liberal fascism is an actual thing precisely because liberal fascists in the guise of progressivism are all about authoritarian government and oppression of pretty much anybody who doesnt hew to the leftist party line, as seen in the freedom-suppressing wildings of liberal fascists at UC Berkeley and pretty much anywhere else a conservative or Republican tries to engage in free speech and expression.

The Wilsonian premise of progressive politicians including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is that we, the People, are simply too stupid to know whats good for us, therefore the more federal bureaucrats there are to shepherd the sheeple the better, and shearing the sheeple to pay for it is obviously necessary. This progressive presumption fits quite nicely with both Marxs useful idiots of Marxism statement and the general opinion of the Socialist elite that the lumpen proletariat cannot govern themselves, which is why Marxist and Progressive elites usually work hand in hand to create oppressive authoritarian governments that definitely qualify as liberally fascistic.

The progressive purpose of creating an enormous federal bureaucracy that gets its marching orders from the President is to unconstitutionally transfer power and control to the Executive branch to marginalize Congress in order to turn it into a mere debating society that has no power of its own. This unchecked administrative state is the ultimate goal of progressivism as espoused by its creator Woodrow Wilson back in 1912 and exemplified by former President Obama when he said Were not just going to be waiting for legislationIve got a penand I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward

Progressives have been moving the ball towards this goal for more than a hundred years and the election of President Trump is viewed by them as the gravest threat progressivism has ever faced: the wholesale dismantling of the administrative state and the salvation of the Separation of Powers doctrine that once again makes all three branches of government equal in authority and equal in power, particularly when it comes to checking and balancing overreaches by the other branches. Thus the hysterical response to President Trumps budget recommendations and the political panic at the prospect of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House going nuclear on progressivism.

When it comes to budget cuts its important to remember that the federal government creates nothing but expenses to taxpayers. Every dollar that the federal government grants to some program or other must be first forcibly extracted from the pockets of the people. These filched funds flows to the government, where at least 15 percent is skimmed off the top to fund the bloated bureaucracy. According to an article in the Washington Post, the government spent $200 billion in discretionary funds on federal employee compensation alone in 2011.

Once the bureaucrats have been paid more is skimmed off to pay for their office buildings, desks, computers, paperclips and for air-conditioning their offices (which if eliminated by executive order would go a long way towards downsizing the bureaucracy all by itself through voluntary attrition from the actual swamp that is DC in the summer).

Only after all the costs of creating and supporting the entire federal bureaucracy are paid is any money left over to grant to federally-funded social programs like National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood. But remember where all that money comes from in the first place: taxpayers. So these programs are simply a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul with a middleman skimming 15 percent off the top. Therefore, any grant the federal government can make can be made by a state with at least a 15 percent increase in available funds.

It is an economic truth that bureaucrats are always looking for something to do in order to justify their existence. The rule for academic researchers and government bureaucrats is publish or perish. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than at the EPA, which under President Obama was the king of pointless and costly over-regulation. According to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce between 2009 and June, 2016 the EPA issued about 3,900 new final rules comprising more than 33,000 pages in the Federal Register that will cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Obama administration stuffed the EPA with platoons of progressive civil-service bureaucrats, who like many pests are incredibly hard to get rid of, precisely in order to publish as many new regulations as possible, whether or not the regulations were actually necessary and regardless of the economic harm they might cause, simply in order to increase the size and power of the administrative state to levels unprecedented in human history.

But along comes President Trump, who was elected in large part based on his promise to downsize the government, and when he proposes to do so more dramatically than any president since Ronald Reagan or perhaps Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the pestilential progressive politicos swarm and subsume all rational discussion in a sea of shrieks about their oxen being gored.

This is not unexpected, but just as one deals with mosquitoes in Alaska by dispensing DEET and then getting on with life we must apply the anodynes against progressive pestilence, which include reason, determination and fiscal responsibility and get on with applying a healthy dose of political DDT to the bloated bureaucracy in DC.

The best way to do that is to deconstruct the EPA administrative state entirely by abolishing the agency and return both the authority and the money to the individual states, all of which have their own environmental protection agencies that are perfectly capable of dealing with environmental issues all by themselves, particularly if the state doesnt have to fork over billions of dollars to the feds every year to run the duplicative and entirely unnecessary EPA. Where environmental issues cross state lines nothing prevents states from either cooperating with one another in making interstate agreements or, if necessary, suing one another in federal court to deal with such problems.

Government that governs from a position as close to those governed as possible is best. That is a fundamental precept of our union of sovereign states and the Founders concept of federalism demands that the federal government butt out of state and local matters. How Colorado deals with a pollution-generating gold mine is not the business of people in New Jersey, and how New Jersey deals with pollution in their rivers is not the business of Coloradoans. And in neither case is federal government meddling either needed or wanted, so we need is to ignore the pests buzzing about and do what needs to be done.

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Budget-Whiners Are Pernicious Pests - Daily Caller