The Social Democratic Front, SDF, party’s national chairman, Hon. Joshua Osih, has strongly called on people in Mutengene, Southwest, and others parts of Cameroon to massively vote in this October’s presidential polls as the only way to end what he viewed as 42 years of hardship under President Paul Biya’s administration.
His meeting with the party’s militants and sympathisers in Mutengene on June 13 was part of his nationwide tour to mark the SDF’s 35th anniversary, which began on May 26.
“Our enemies today are those who don’t vote… Since 1992 when the SDF won the election, Mr Biya has never crossed 2.5 million voters… This is less than 10 percent of Cameroonians. It means that 10 percent of Cameroonians have been determining the fate of this country for more than 40 years. The only way to change that is to vote,” he told his listeners, addressing them in Pidgin English.
Osih reiterated that those who do not register and vote in the upcoming election “have no right to complain” about bad roads, power cuts, unemployment, inflation and insecurity.
He asked internally displaced persons and others who have relocated from where they initially enrolled to approach Elections Cameroon and change their polling stations to match their current location.
Addressing scepticism over electoral integrity, Osih dismissed the widespread belief that votes do not count due to alleged rigging by the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement party, CPDM.
Recalling how he won the Wouri East parliamentary seat in Douala, where he contested against 20 candidates, Hon Joshua Osih said elections cannot be rigged when people massively vote.
His Mutengene event was attended by hundreds of people, including SDF leaders from Buea, Tiko AND Limbe, alongside militants and sympathisers as well as neutral people who turned out to interact with him.
June 13, when the event took place, marked exactly two years since the party’s founding father and former national chairman, Ni John Fru Ndi, died. They remembered Fru Ndi for his charismatic and sacrificial leadership and strive for democracy in Cameroon.
Joshua Osih reminded Cameroonians of the SDF’s historic role in shaping the country’s democracy.
“35 years is not a small time and we realised that most voters today were born after the SDF and many people unfortunately believe that multiparty politics started sometime in 2015/16 with the democratisation of social media. So it is our duty to go and inform Cameroonians that the liberty that we have today was fought by this party, brought about by this party and that is why you, the media houses, exist today and nobody else can tell that story better than the SDF,” he said.
He used the event to sell the SDF’s manifesto for the 2025 election, with particular emphasis on how they will handle the economy, education, and the form of state, if elected.
He elaborated on the SDF’s plan to give back power to the people by instituting a federal form of government, which will operate within a semi-presidential state.
“…for the first three years in power, we are going to start a national conversation that will start with reconciliation and will end up with a constitutional conference that will propose a new constitution to the people of Cameroon. We want to present it in the form of a referendum and we really strongly hope we will win that referendum and that the SDF’s agenda for a federal government in Cameroon will be put in place,” he said.
He added that they are instituting a “semi-presidential and federal form of the state in order to give back power to the people. And so most of the complaints that we have today, be they those that brought up the crisis in the Northwest and Southwest or be it whatever we see round the country with tribalism and so on will be able to put at rest in an institutional form”.
In education, he said the SDF will provide free education up to Advanced Level, and step up its quality. To curb unemployment, he said the SDF will capitalise on industrialisation, setting up industrial zones across the country to process and transform everything that is produced in Cameroon. He envisaged that this will drastically boost the economy, noting that it will help the SDF create not less than three million jobs within the first year, if elected.
Concerning the Anglophone Crisis, which has killed over 6,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands since 2016, he said the SDF will end the violence in 100 days but will take three years to make necessary constitutional reforms to permanently resolve the Anglophone problem.
“We are going for a major election in October and I was telling the people of Mutengene that they have the choice between voting for the conflict to continue or voting for it to end. We definitely want this conflict to end. There is no political party in Cameroon… that knows the Southwest and the Northwest regions of Cameroon better than the Social Democratic Front,” he said.
By Hope Nda
