{{A senior Cameroon government official has said claims that President Paul Biya\u2019s son swindled millions from the state with impunity are [totally \u201cunfounded\u201d lies against an admirable young man.}}<\/p>\n
The allegations are part of a \u201cmacabre strategy\u201d peddled by a covert yet well-known network of the president\u2019s opponents who have failed to beat him through the ballot box, according to Higher Education minister, Prof Jacques Fame Ndongo.<\/p>\n
\u201cFranck Biya is a bright young man who is at odds with the economic ogre that some people want to link him with in the face of Cameroonians, in order to serve him as fodder for the predators or scavengers of history,\u201d Prof Ndongo said in a strongly worded opinion piece in Wednesday\u2019s issue of the ruling Cameroon People\u2019s Democratic Movement (CPDM) party\u2019s newspaper, L\u2019Action.<\/p>\n
It is a futile attempt at convincing public opinion that Op\u00e9ration \u00c9pervier (Operation Sparrow Hawk), an anti-graft campaign the president launched in 2005, is just a political witch-hunt in no way linked to weeding out corruption, the minister who also serves as CPDM\u2019s communication secretary argues.<\/p>\n
State-run bilingual daily Cameroon Tribune carried the same one-page article on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The allegations have gained widespread coverage and split local media down the middle since a local advocacy group petitioned MPs to probe Franck Emmanuel Olivier Biya.<\/p>\n
A pro-government weekly, Hot News, said the president\u2019s son was paying the price for being \u201cdiscreet\u201d and \u201cgenerous\u201d.<\/p>\n
Leading French language daily Le Jour, which first broke the allegations as front page news on November 12 alongside L\u2019 Oeil du Sahel, said on Tuesday that the government was desperately seeking to counter the damning allegations.<\/p>\n
L\u2019Action, which dedicated three pages in its Wednesday issue to defending the first son, also brought in two business law experts to prove that Franck Biya\u2019s dealings were duly legal.<\/p>\n
The Alliance for the Defence of Public Property, an advocacy group, says in 2006 the first son bilked more than FCFA 100 billion ($197 million) from the state when Cameroon was grappling with a messy liquidity crisis which started in 1997 and risked crippling the country.<\/p>\n
A vocal opposition MP, Jean Michel Nintcheu of the Social Democratic Front, has thrown his weight behind the petition by calling on government not to shrug off the accusations.<\/p>\n
Some other family members of the president who hold key positions in government and other senior officials are accused of having facilitated the fraud, which involved buying treasury bonds reportedly well below their prices and excessively overpricing them at resale.<\/p>\n
One of the greatest fears of those who back the petition, Prof Ndongo suggested, is that President Paul Biya could hand over power to his son. But he added: “Cameroon is not a monarchy. <\/p>\n
It is a democratic and liberal republic. Accession to the post of president follows rules laid down by the constitution,\u201d the minister says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{A senior Cameroon government official has said claims that President Paul Biya\u2019s son swindled millions from the state with impunity are [totally \u201cunfounded\u201d lies against an admirable young man.}} The allegations are part of a \u201cmacabre strategy\u201d peddled by a covert yet well-known network of the president\u2019s opponents who have failed to beat him through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-4345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4345"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=4345"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=4345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}