Kah Walla May Challenge Biya In 2011

The ruling CPDM is reported to be in a state of panic following allegations that Cameroon‘s frontline opposition party, the SDF, is contemplating choosing a woman as Presidential candidate.

Kah Walla: nursing presidential ambitions?

The woman in question, The Post learnt, is Kah Walla, the firebrand SDF NEC member who is also member of the party’s Strategic Committee and Coordinator of the popular movement, Cameroun O’Bosso. In a bid to counter Kah Walla, whose popularity is soaring with each passing day, The Post learnt, President Biya is also ruminating on the idea of choosing a woman as his running mate in the 2011 Presidential Election.

Our source disclosed that the CPDM sees the choice of a woman as the most effective strategy to counter Kah Walla who is not only perfectly bilingual, but has made significant inroads into Biya’s political fief with ideological ‘big fishes’ like Eric Owona, a Political Science Professor at the University of Yaounde II (Soa), already in her net.

Her media outings, especially on CRTV, have also been scaring the living daylights out of the CPDM, beginning from a debate in which she made mincemeat of Fidelis Nji, a CPDM MP who is also National Assembly Questor. (It should be noted that because of her fiery eloquence, some of her meetings have been banned and she had to hold others by outwitting security forces.)

Kah Walla, our source further said, is also dreaded because she is popular with the youth who see her as the only source of hope for them, and given that Cameroon is a gerontocracy (government by old people) with no concrete programme for the younger generation. The ruling CPDM, The Post was told, is frightened that if she can get the majority of Cameroon’s female folk, victory for the CPDM will be hard to come by, considering that women constitute over 51 percent of Cameroon’s population.

To counter her and also to maintain regional balance, President Biya who, according to press reports, was advised by the French to reintroduce the post of Vice President into the Cameroon Constitution (scraping off the PM’s post) intends to choose one of three Anglophone CPDM loyalists: Regina Mundi, a CPDM Central Committee member, Emma Lafon, a CPDM baroness from Bui and Rose Abunaw, Manyu CPDM Parliamentarian.

None of these three has been acquainted with the fact that one of them is likely to be chosen as Biya’s running mate, probably because the bill reintroducing the post of Vice President is yet to come up in Parliament. Our source, however, disclosed that government, through indirect means, has succeeded in sampling the opinions of each of them on what could be done to win Anglophones over to the CPDM.

Two of them reportedly mentioned the problem of roads, while the third talked of a university for the Northwest, preferably situated in Bambili. Of the three, our source disclosed that the most likely choice is Rose Abunaw because her activities cut across the two Anglophone regions where she has been showered with many titles and awards of recent.

She has won parliamentary elections three times in her own region, she is Manyu I WCPDM President and has risen to the rank of Vice President in the National Assembly.
The issue is likely to come up during the coming CPDM congress, he said.

By Peterkins Manyong|September 26, 2010|The Postonline|