Who’s afraid of Muna?

Bernard Muna should be walking with springs in his strides now after his big show in Bamenda the other weekend, a bigger-than-imagined-success, as panic reactions from opponents can signal.


Devoid of any heavyweight  political party grouping, the event may have been written off, but those who should know are not ignoring it. They are evidently shaken by the Muna outing. Ni John Fru Ndi, SDF chairman and long-time Muna rival, tried to water it down, describing him and his associates as clowns, after Muna challenged Fru Ndi to enter the primaries race. SDF’s North West coordinator Henry Kum called it Muna’s political ambush.

But it is the ruling CPDM that is showing more worries. There are hints Biya’s new espionage coordinator, Paul Atanga Nji, was spotted in Bamenda on the day of Muna’s event, attempting to distract the local population with tons of foodstuff and cooking gas handouts.

 Then the very next edition of the CPDM newspaper, L’Action said “All that glitters is not Orange” in its editorial, and attempted to ridicule the Muna/Orange Offer. Evidently, the CPDM wished the event had not taken place.

In further evidence that Muna’s show made waves, Francois Mebenga, a CPDM propagandist, found a way to blast the Muna show on Canal Presse. He wondered what business civil society groups had to endorse a political candidate. But Tazoacha Asonganyi has been emphasising the vital role of civil society in political mobilisation and in Guinea Conakry it took civil society action to shake the foundation of the Dadis Camara junta.

Yet do not expect Muna to sweep the votes in October 2011. For a first-timer, beating 20-year veteran candidates with bigger, more established political platforms like Biya, Fru Ndi and Ndam Njoya will be a tall order. But Muna’s trump card could lie in an eventual deadlock. Where Ndam Njoya was often the opposition compromise tie-breaker, Muna could jolly well be another option.

His father’s son, he could benefit from across-the-board acceptability around the country thanks to ST Muna’s reputation as a nation-builder alongside Ahmadou Ahidjo. This means that the average Francophone can easily embrace Muna. He can more easily cut into the huge northern vote where his father was seen at the side of Ahidjo.
SDF founding Secretary-General Siga Asanga understood this strategic reality when he invited Muna, then already under discipline within the SDF in 1993, for a party implantation tour of the greater North. Asanga was sanctioned for it by people who knew that would boost Muna’s profile.

And though Muna is generally presented as someone Anglophones associate with his father’s “betrayal”, many non-militant Anglophones can accept Muna for his qualities. If he failed to win any seats in 2007, blame it not on ineffectiveness, but on the youthfulness then of his barely months-old APF.

Many have not forgotten that against the stigma placed on Ben Muna since the early 1990s as overly ambitious and liable to sell out to the regime, he is now redeemable as nothing in his record supports that stigma.

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