By Budi Ebala
The recent the killing of seven school children in Kumba with 12 others injured has been receiving condemnations from across the board.
Bamenda-based agro-industrialist and CEO of Farmer’s House, Peter Ngufor, has lamented that after Ngarbuh now is Kumba, describing the Kumba killings as disheartening.
He was speaking over the weekend during a press briefing in his office in Nkwen Bamenda.
“If people just get in to a school and kill children be they military or Amba fighters, it doesn’t make any sense. The war is taking the country to nowhere other than falling into more mess,” he said.
To him, those who took up arms and went into the bushes did so out of frustration and frustration cannot be fought with guns.
“….You don’t fight complaining children by killing them…… The solution to the problem cannot be the continuous fighting and killings. Kumba would have been avoided if the verdict on the perpetrators of Ngarbuh was made public……,” he added.
According to the CEO of Farmer’s House, when verdicts are made public they act as deterrents to future occurrence.
Peter Ngufor called on the Head of State, who has the powers given to him by the people at his reelection in 2018, to stop the war.
“On my knees, I am joining the women to beg President Paul Biya, who is our father, to call off this war and let’s redirect our resources to more useful projects, not war,” he stated.
He said from the 70s he knew Paul Biya as a perfect gentleman and could tell from a distance what he can do and what he cannot. Pa Ngufor said the events in the last four years have made him not to be able to identify with the man he knew. As an elected leader in 2018, he said Paul Biya whom every Cameroonian is looking up to for solution to the ongoing crisis, should do something.
He cautioned the Head of State to be very careful as he delegates powers to others to talk on his behalf.
“Biya has to leave a legacy and we need to guide and protect him,” Peter Ngufor.
Ngufor said Biya didn’t ask to be made President and Amadou Ahidjo did not hand over power in good faith. He noted that the crisis rocking the two English-speaking regions is not the making of Paul Biya but Amadou Ahidjo who failed to solve the problem. To him, Biya has tried in his style to handle the Anglophone question over the years though it keeps resurfacing.
Instead of quarreling and fighting over what can be fixed, Pa Ngufor said Cameroonians should have a rethink with the government focusing on infrastructural development.
He wondered what is happening with the huge natural resources yet there are no roads.
Looking at the road from Bamenda to Babadjou which is 78km and takes over four hours instead of 2hours 45 minutes just because of the deplorable state of the road, Ngufor said it is the same scenario everywhere in the country.
“Rwanda came out of a difficult situation and is today one of the best countries in Africa and Uganda which was considered one of the least countries and is beating the records of Nigeria in terms of infrastructure,” he said. To him Cameroon, with all the resources, is wasting a lot of time on the same spot.
