2020 : Year Of Exceptional Challenges

Everybody who has made it through the year 2020 will have a story to tell not just in terms of the way other years have usually come and gone, but more because of the unique nature of the year. Yet, the fact that people have survived 2020 is an indication of the wrong apocalyptic predictions that some have had about events this year, especially with the unexpected outbreak of the new Coronavirus pandemic or Covid-19. 
 The novel strain of coronavirus – SARS-CoV-2 otherwise called coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in China`s Hubei province that has a population of 11 million inhabitants. By December 2020 that virus according to the World Health Organisation had spread to over 200 countries, and by 11 March 2020 the WHO had qualified the disease as a pandemic. By December, statistics were already talking of 75,476,471 laboratory-confirmed cases of infections with 1,686,267 deaths. Worse cases of infections and deaths ironically came from Western and Asian countries that have the best equipped heath care facilities.     
Such figures made Cameroon like other African countries to feel comparatively comfortable in terms of the negative health impact from the outbreak. As of 21 December 2020 the country counted 25,846 cases detected with 448 deaths and 23,851 persons who had recovered from the ailment at a time it was witnessing a second wave in the Developed World with thousands of daily cases reported. Having confidence that the measures put in place by the State to tackle the global scourge are working, Cameroon has had to take advantage of the situation to ensure that the country gets viable institutions that meet popular demands. One of such concerns has been the implementation of provisions of the 18 January 1996 Constitution.        
According to the final provisions of the 1996 Constitution, Article 67 (1) states that; “The new institutions of the Republic provided for under this Constitution shall be set up progressively.” Between its enactment into law in 1996 and 6 December 2020, the country methodically made strides in ensuring that the people are served with what they were promised. However, the story would have been simple to tell were it not for tragic episodes like the separatist agenda that emerged in 2016 in the South West and North West regions with its attendant loss of human life and generalised hardship that such demands have inflicted on the population.     
Faced with such challenges, President Paul Biya has employed every avenue to safeguard the territorial integrity of the country while seeking solutions to the genuine demands posed by citizens of this country. One such giant stride in solution-seeking was the Major National Dialogue in 2019 which resolved to create q Special Status for the two aggrieved regions and to get it implanted into the national agenda. The organisation of the Regional Election on 6 December, 2020 crystallised the pledge into concrete reality. It added to the 9 February, 2020 Legislative and Council electio...