National political debate has been fueled in the past months over the effective application of Article 66 of the January 18, 1996 Constitution of the Republic of Cameroon (subsequently modified). By that Article, the principal officers of government are expected to declare their assets at the time they take office.As the recent wind of change began blowing against officials accused of graft, many actors of the political class ?? including opposition figures, political activists, leaders of civic organizations and members of non-governmental organizations ?? have been quite vocal over the need to get ??Article 66?? of the Constitution

operational. These calls must be understood in the general context of a pandemonium of sorts which has been engendered by the rather upbeat posture taken by the campaign against corruption and graft which, in the past few months and weeks, has seen the arrests of public officials without regard for grade.The outing by the Minister of Communication Engineer Issa Tchiroma Bakary last Tuesday, provided one good occasion to set the records straight as he sought to provide ready answers for some of the numerous questions surrounding the whole initiative. First and foremost is government??s desire is to ensure that a few greedy individuals do not take the nation??s wealth hostage. Not, at least, when the government is in a determined fight against poverty and keeping misery at bay.Secondly the Minister, who is also the government spokesman, was out to tell Cameroonians that the antigraft campaign is a perennial exercise which will continue for as long as pockets of misdemeanor and other impeachable attitudes are noticed in the handling of the nation??s common wealth. The exercise is, therefore, not a surreptitious one as the press has tended to portray it by giving it a code-name: ??Operation Sparrow Hawk?? which, in the minister??s reasoning, circumvents this well-thought-out political commitment started as far back as when President Paul Biya took office in November 1982. In his inaugural address to the National Assembly at that time, he took the commitment to introduce rigour as well as moralise the management of State affairs.Mr Tchiroma Bakary used the press outing of last Tuesday to make some useful contributions to the comprehension of the letter and the spirit of Article 66 of the January 18, 1996 Constitution.For the government spokesman, the current campaign to fish out corrupt officials and stem the rising number of cases of embezzlement is the operational interpretation of ??Article 66??. ??The desired objective of this Constitutional provision is the protection of national wealth and this objective is being attained by the anti-corruption campaign being waged by government??, Tchiroma argued.The Minister used several graphic examples to illustrate the fact that it did not require a folkloric application of the Constitutional provision to attain the desired results; saddling his argument on the fact that government is aware of what each office-holder possesses at the time of taking office.Many government critics are brandishing the absence of an ??application text?? to Article 66. But from the Minister??s arguments of Tuesday, this could simply be a semantic-cum-procedural exercise. What Cameroonians, in their vast majority, expect is to ensure that their national wealth is not squandered by a few greedy individuals. And the current anti-corruption campaign seems to be doing just that.
Nkendem FORBINAKE, CT

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