By
Macdonald Ayang Okumb
It is always not in the best of interests to
question every action of the Head of State, lest we are tagged as being
regressive. But when the Commander-in-Chief does certain things in certain
ways, certain questions unavoidably come to mind.
On Friday 16 October 2015, President Paul Biya, for
the first time since the Banga-Mpongo Kenya Airways crash in 2007, decreed a
national day of mourning in memoriam of the Cameroonian Muslim pilgrims who
lost their lives in a stampede in Mina, a town near Mecca while on Hajj.
That the day of mourning was instituted is not a
problem, but the fact that it was not made a public holiday and that it came so
belatedly - almost a month after the tragic incident occurred on 24 September, was
questionable.
And not only that, the controversy that surrounded
the exact figures of those who actually died in the tragedy was worrying. Communication
Minister, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, said in a press conference that the death toll stood
at 76, but his colleague of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation,
Rene Emmanuel Sadi, who’s the Chairman of the National Hajj Commission,
contradicted him when he said on 20 October, and I quote; “nous sommes globalement à 104 décès.”
This can be roughly
translated in English to mean “we are now at 104 deaths.” So which of the
ministers should we believe? I think for Cameroonians to have known exactly how
many of the pilgrims either died or went missing in Mecca without any mix up,
it would have been more expedient for government to rather tell us how many of
4,467 pilgrims who went on the Hajj actually returned home.
Although the fervour of national
mourning can differ dramatically from one country to another, or may be from
the discretion of one president to another, the underlying factor
is that the exercise is such a solemn one that must be observed with all
sacrosanctity. That’s why, for instance, I sharply disagreed with a political
analyst who said on CRTV’s Sunday talk show “Press Hour” on 18 October that,
what was of import was the fact that the Head of State ordered that flags
across the nation be flown at half mast. And that it was not important whatever
activities individual citizens engaged in on that day. Even so, I saw flags at
some public offices and at chiefs’ palaces that were fully flown.
In most parts of the world, a day of national
mourning is referred to as a “silent day” where music, dance events, or other
public demonstrations are totally prohibited. But that was not the case on 16
October. So can we say that we genuinely commiserated with our fallen brothers?
There’s no gainsaying that even at the level of
homes, it matters a lot the activities of family members whenever they are
mourning a loved one. You would hardly hear secular music being played, and so
loudly. Mourners would not chat and laugh so uncontrollably and lousily. They’d
naturally maintain an extremely sober mood.
That aside; even when four days later (on Tuesday 20
October 2015), the President decreed a national day of prayer for the victims,
he himself did not attend the service.
Couldn’t it have been exemplary and maybe a demonstration
of genuine grief for the Head of State to have attended the national prayers at
the multipurpose sports complex in Yaoundé? Was it appropriate for him to have
rather sent the minister of territorial administration and decentralisation to
represent him? Was he not by his absence from the prayers somehow under looking
its importance?
Verily, this has actually pushed me to question the
very essence of that national day of mourning; what it really amounted to in
practice, or whether it was indeed a meaningful expression of the grief of the Head
of State and the Cameroonian nation or it was purely a symbolic political
gesture intended to flatter the Muslims, who constitute a reasonable portion of
the country teeming with dissension against the regime?
Certainly, the way president Biya
treated the national mourning issue, gives ample credence to the views of a United
States professor, Jill Scott, an expert in the social dynamics of mourning, who
once told the BBC that days of national mourning are “inherently political”.
If not, why has the Head of State not
also thought of declaring a day, or days of national mourning for the hundreds
of Cameroonians who have been killed by Boko Haram insurgents either through
border attacks or suicide bombings which are now their modus operandi? With due
respect for the souls of the departed Muslim brothers of ours, I however think
that no Cameroonian soul is more important than another. Like a fellow
columnist wrote in a sister newspaper, what is good for the goose is also good
for the ganger. I was just musing randomly.
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