President Paul Biya during the country's National Day celebration.
YAOUNDE, Cameroon
Cameroon has been celebrating
51 years as unified nation with a military and civilian parade on National
Unity Day in its capital Yaounde.
Nothing divides people in the
Central African nation today as their history epitomized in the National
Unity Day celebrated on May 20 since 1972.
For all but 10 of those years
it has been ruled by just one man, President Paul Biya. And at 91 years old he
is now the oldest head of state in the world.
The country is now less united
than ever: Thousands of people have been killed since 2016 and over a
million people displaced after a group of Anglophone Cameroonians began to
fight Biya's Francophone government.
Some of those who watched the
parade sounded optimistic about their country's future and welcomed the day.
"It is to remind that we
are one people, it's to remind that it's together that we can build and
develop, it's to remind that it's together that we can be happy, it's together
that we can live in peace," said Therese Temgoua, a Francophone
Cameroonian who is a bank executive.
"I think it's a happy
day, and what I've seen today shows that Cameroon's democracy is actually in
the right direction," Enobi Akepe, an anglophone Cameroonian who is a
university lecturer, said.
But one francophone journalist
described the unity of the country as a "facade."
"Today, Cameroonians
agree that we are living in a certain facade of unity. First, because in the
North-West and South-West, you know that there are secessionists who do not let
us breathe. On the other hand, we see the rise of hatred in the country,"
said Pierre Youte, a journalist and the director of Soleil d'Afrique newspaper.
This rainy season Cameroon is
also facing a cholera epidemic which has spread to all of its regions and is known
to have infected around 20,000 people.
The figure is likely to be
higher as only those infected people who manage to reach hospital are counted.
On Friday, on the eve of National Unity Day, the authorities closed down some of Yaounde's food markets to prevent the spread of the deadly bacterial disease.
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