THE POLITICS OF HOSTING: POLITICAL INTIMACY AND LEGITIMACY IN CAMEROON

For Herzfeld (Reference Herzfeld1997), the politics of intimacy in the everyday life of nation states as pursued by their officials, what he calls ‘the culture of intimacy’, is punctuated by practices of onstage and offstage politics that straddle official and unofficial logics. In contemporary Cameroon, hosting the head of state is one of those political rituals of state-making that is marked by such visible, onstage displays of political affections that generate a kind of complicity and intimacy between the leader and his followers, as well as by the backstage negotiations that precede or follow them as actors undertake political exchange. As a model of human communication, the ‘host–guest opposition’ is premised on notions of hospitality, fraternity, generosity and solidarity, wherein there is an opportunity, a responsibility even, for the host to entertain and care for their guests even as it also offers them the space to make demands on them (Khayutina Reference Khayutina2002: 77–8; Gotmann Reference Gotmann2001). As Hackman and Johnson (Reference Hackman and Johnson2002) suggest, such intimate interaction ‘allows for the regulation’ of the actions of both host and guest, potentially enabling each to ‘suggest, plead, command, or convince’. Akhil Gupta argues generally that ‘face-to-face contact and spatial proximity’ are a kind of ‘physics of presence’ (Reference Gupta1995: 375), one that I suggest allows actors to potentially bridge the pre-existing geography of power between power-holders and followers.

Potentially, then, approached as a cultural practice of power, hosting assumes some efficacy for both the host and the guest. As indicated above, my political ethnography on the politics of hosting President Biya by Anglophone elites within his CPDM party rests on two cases. The first derives from my own ethnographic observations of various events organized by elites of the South-West Region in Buea. I unpack the ongoing efforts of the South-West elites as very much a ‘work in progress’. The second is my attempt to reconstruct the actual spectacle of Biya's visit to Bamenda under the hospitality of North-West elites within the CPDM as a moment of patrimonial exchange of ‘development’ for political support between host and guest. Although Biya's visit to the North-West Region occurred prior to my arrival in Cameroon, I got a distinct sense of the spectacular efficacy with which it was staged through the private and public media (newspaper and television news reports). Hence, my reconstructed analysis of the case of Biya's visit to Bamenda rests very much on a content analysis of selected stories from the popular media (print and audiovisual), which are themselves critical to the very process of spectacularizing the efficacy of such visits.

Indeed, both cases of the elite politics of hosting in the two Anglophone regions of Cameroon illustrate the highly visible role of the media in these efforts by both Biya and the CPDM elites to spectacularize a kind of patrimonial intimacy between them. Apart from a few critical private press outlets such as Le Messager and La Nouvelle Expression and a few private radio and television stations such as Equinox Radio, Equinox TV, Canal 2 International and LTM TV, the editorial lines of most private newspapers are almost as subservient as the state media because of their substantial reliance on elite patronage. For instance, Chief Barrister George Tabetando, a wealthy CEO of EurOil Corporation and a senator since April 2013, has been one of the patrons of the Cameroon Association of English Speaking Journalists (CAMASEJ). In this role he often supports the press association. In January 2008, ‘during a courtesy visit paid him by some CAMASEJ executive members’, Chief Tabetando ‘listened to the litany of the difficulties confronting CAMASEJ’. In the end he ‘made a financial gesture to the association, hoping that in this manner, he could contribute to assuaging the woes of the executive of CAMASEJ’ (The Post 2008). The state-owned Cameroon Radio and Television (CRTV) and its printed press, Cameroon Tribune, mainly serve as channels for Biya's political propaganda, especially in the constant broadcasting of ‘votes of confidence’ (so-called ‘motions of support’) from CPDM elites to Biya. Such patrimonial complicity between elites and the private media limits the potential for critical journalism in Cameroon (see Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001; Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2005; Nyamnjoh et al. Reference Nyamnjoh, Wete and Fonchingong1996, among others). As will be evident throughout this article, the media (both public and private) largely serve as ‘megaphones’ and elaborators of the political projects of the ruling elites in the CPDM, and especially of those of President Biya.

THE ETHNO-REGIONAL POLITICS OF HOSTING IN THE SOUTH-WEST REGION

I encountered the politics of hosting the Cameroonian head of state in mid-December 2010 when I arrived in Buea, the small capital of the South-West Region, to start my fieldwork on the political elites from this region of the country. These elites – from local political figures such as village chiefs and mayors to national ones such as directors of public corporations and high-ranking officers in the military and paramilitary corps, as well as ministers – are largely affiliated within the ethno-regional associations called the South-West Elite Association (SWELA) and the South-West Chiefs Conference (SWCC). The coastal town of Buea is smaller than Bamenda, the capital of the other Anglophone-speaking region (the North-West).

On 22 December 2010 I was invited by one of my former teachers and friends to the Chariot Hotel in Buea to attend a ‘meet the press’ event organized by a national non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Changing Mentalities and Empowerment Groups (CHAMEG), where the local CPDM party leader and mayor of Buea, Mr Charles Mbella Moki (now a senator), was the invited speaker. He came to answer questions from members of CHAMEG, the press and the general audience about his progress in the implementation of a gender diversity programme within his council administration. During this question-and-answer session, someone in the audience made an observation about the irksomeness caused by the regular and almost abusive cuts in the supply of pipe-borne water in the municipality. In response, Charles Mbella Moki said that the problem stemmed from the government's initial decision to create a university in the town of Buea without anticipatory measures to improve the infrastructural capacities of the small town (which had previously had only a few thousand people living there) to meet the utilities demand that the additional population would entail. He therefore impressed upon us, the audience, the urgency with which ‘Buea needs to be made into a city council’, with substantially greater funding allocations to its local council administration from the government. For this to be possible, he continued:

By calling on everyone to support his efforts for the commemorative ceremony for Cameroon's fifty years of reunification (initially planned for 2011) to be held in Buea, the ‘meet the press’ event had become part of the emerging effort by the South-West political elites to engage in the politics of ‘hosting’ the head of state. Quite directly, too, the mayor pointed to the redistributive potential that an opportunity to host the head of state could bring to the town of Buea. Also, as I will discuss in greater detail subsequently, at least through Mayor Moki's comments, the ‘meet the press’ event served as a forum for the Buea elites in the CPDM to publicize their interests and engage in the backstage negotiations of the expectations associated with the opportunity to host Biya. This was done with the help of local journalists in the South-West Region. The master of ceremonies for the ‘meet the press’ event was Anne Munjong. She is not only a very close friend of CHAMEG's president, Madam Magdalene Agbor, but also the popular host of Global Voices, a women's show on the state-owned CRTV Radio Buea station. Additionally, there was radio and television coverage of the event by the television crew of the national station of CRTV, just as much as there was coverage by other teams of journalists from other private media houses (audiovisual and print).

Mayor Moki's open expression of Buea's claim to a historical legacy that entitled it to host the reunification celebrations was followed by another public posturing event by the South-West elites. One month after the ‘meet the press’ event, these elites organized a ‘South-West mega-forum’ in Buea at which Charles Mbella Moki played a major role as mayor of the town and ‘host’. This was jointly organized by the SWELA and the SWCC, two organizations that serve as arenas for the political mobilization of elites of the region for the purposes of ethno-regional politics (see Nyamnjoh and Rowlands Reference Nyamnjoh and Rowlands1998; Orock Reference Orock2014). The politics of such a mega-forum are so intricately derived from and tied to the politics of the hosting of the head of state that took place in the North-West Region that they bear some elaboration.

Held on 29 January 2011 at the Pavillon Hall of the National Social Insurance Fund in Buea, the South-West mega-forum was well attended by most of the prominent members of the South-West's elites, especially ministers, former ministers and chiefs. The hall was so full that canopies were set out in the yard to accommodate less powerful members of the elite, such as university professors and administrators, bank managers, deputies to the mayors of the various towns in the region, as well as curious ‘ordinary people’ who thought they should come and see what this highly advertised event was all about.

Officially, the main objective of the mega-forum was advertised as being a focused discussion by the elites on the development problems facing the region and the potential solutions they could bring to these. In reality, however, this was only an excuse to call South-West elites together to engage in the politics of hosting. From the outset of the forum, attendees were exhorted by Mayor Moki, in his welcome address as host of the event, to ‘remain united and relentlessly work for this historic town of Buea to host the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the reunification of Cameroon’. This statement indicates Mayor Moki's apparent awareness that his continuous claims to Buea's ‘historical legacy’ to host the reunification were not shared by all the South-West elites. Nonetheless, the elaborate political staging of a mega-forum by the South-West elites was evidently intended to draw Biya's attention to the historic role of the South-West Region in general and to Buea (in the particular case of Mayor Moki and others) in Anglophone politics, making these deserving hosts for the event.

For over six hours, speaker after speaker emphasized the role of Buea in Cameroon's political history. As far as the South-West elites were concerned, this contest to host President Biya, while potentially affording them personal prestige in terms of photo opportunities with the head of state, also assumed ethnic and regional dimensions in the wake of the successes of other regions in the country in securing development promises or projects from Biya while he was their guest.

This sense of ethnic and regional competition as the motivation for engaging in the politics of hosting became apparent when the mega-forum itself exposed some cracks between the older and younger generations in the powerful block of South-West political elites (see Orock Reference Orock2013). At the end of this mega-forum, Mayor Moki declared to pressmen standing not too far away from me that:

Mayor Moki was embittered by the reluctance on the part of the Kumba-based elite, led by Chief Victor Mukete, to embrace his argument for Buea's unquestionable claim to host Biya's visit. There was thus an apparent intra-South-West elite struggle, in which a group of the ethnic Bakweri elites, who are indigenes of Buea under Mayor Moki's leadership, was opposed to the Kumba-based elite under Chief Mukete's leadership. The latter seemed to contest such claims by also evoking the historical role played by the city of Kumba in Southern Cameroon's nationalist and reunification politics in the 1950s. Thus, as an example that illustrates the political efforts to construct a cultural space for the staging of political intimacy between local elites and Paul Biya through the hosting of state ceremonies, the ethnographic details from Buea highlight how divisive, especially from an ethnic or regional standpoint, the process can be. The competition to host Biya amongst elites in Cameroon, especially among the Anglophone elites, primarily assumes ethnic or regional proportions. In this instance, elites within the same ethno-regional community of the South-West competed to secure the same, if not more, ‘gifts’ of development as the other regions (especially the North-West) that had enjoyed the privilege of hosting Biya had received. For these regional elites, doing this is one way to prove their political efficacy to their local communities. This explains why the younger politician, Mayor Moki, called for the ‘old guard’ to let him and those of his generation lead the charge for the struggle to host Biya during the reunification on behalf of the South-West.

Prior to returning to offer a fuller analysis of the ongoing efforts by the South-West political elites in the ruling CPDM party to host President Biya, I will, with the help of a reconstruction based on media coverage, now turn to an account of the North-West's hosting of Biya and its successes in obtaining ‘gifts of development’ during his visit to their region. This will not only help in justifying why the South-West elites came to see the opportunity to host Biya as a worthwhile political pursuit, but will also help in underlining more clearly the symbolic politics of expectations and patrimonial redistribution that punctuated the interactions before, during and after the event. The press items analysed here were selected mainly because they present various facets of how the particular interests, anxieties and expectations associated with the hosting in Bamenda were made apparent.

‘HIS EXCELLENCY’ VISITS THE NORTH-WEST: THE POLITICS OF SPECTACLE AND DEVELOPMENT

Although initially scheduled for 28 November and postponed at least twice after that date, Cameroon commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of her armed forces between 8 and 9 December 2010. Although the country's capital city is Yaoundé, for this occasion Bamenda, the capital of the North-West Region, played host to President Paul Biya and many of the country's high-ranking political elites and foreign dignitaries. When I arrived in Cameroon two days after the anniversary and visited my in-laws in Bamenda one week after this presidential trip, I easily noticed that the town had received a facelift, most remarkably with a newly constructed grandstand fit for a ‘presidential environment’. As a local newspaper reported of the preparations, the city authorities had ‘ordered a repainting of some buildings and demolition of make-shifts that are an eye-sore’, while ‘garages and other workshops which were hitherto very exposed to the road’ were also ‘ordered to be enclosed’ (The Herald Tribune 2010a: 7).

Many of the people I met in places such as bus parks or the market still talked vigorously about what happened during the celebrations. They talked about the great and culturally diverse dance performances (for which the peoples of the Bamenda grassfields are legendary in Cameroon) that were performed to the great excitement of the guests, especially the First Lady. Sitting at a roadside restaurant on Bamenda's Commercial Avenue with six middle-aged men who said they worked at Vatican Express bus service and were having a break, I listened as they argued about the benefits of Biya's visit. One clearly thought that ‘the government delegate performed his role very well. He asked for all the things that people in the North-West need urgently and have been asking for for a long time now.’ In a more confident tone, another asserted that ‘Bamenda's development is now assured, if only Biya will keep to those numerous promises’.Footnote ²

This optimism was also reflected in the local press, where one keen observer remarked of the celebrations afterwards: ‘the president cannot come and go without fallouts … the Bamenda ceremonial ground is now a replica of that in Yaoundé’ (The Vanguard 2010: 8; see also CRTV 2010a). Indeed, as I looked for further clues in the media reports as to what really happened during the hosting of Biya in Bamenda, I found that local cultural idioms of patrimonial power associated with ‘Fonship’ (chieftaincy) mediated the symbolic and material relations between Biya and the elites of the North-West Region within the space that the Bamenda hosting provided.

Since the beginning of Biya's tenure in 1982, the history of the relationship between the North-West (and Bamenda) and President Biya can be characterized as a love–hate romance. It began with his popular appeal there in the 1980s. This appeal faded suddenly with the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1990, when the first opposition party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF), was launched in Bamenda by its chairman, John Fru Ndi, a man from the North-West Region. While this popular appeal has not returned to any great extent among the masses in the North-West, who still very much support the SDF, most of the elites in the region, like those across the country, have been gradually returning to the fold of the ruling party since the late 1990s.

Despite this history of organized political oppositionFootnote ³ to his rule in the region, in reality the North-West Region has been the area that has received the most visits from Biya over his thirty-one-year presidency. This justifies its metaphoric elevation to his ‘second home’, in his own words, especially in his address during this visit. Nevertheless, Biya's prolonged absence from nearly every part of the country, including the capital city of Yaoundé itself (Pigeaud Reference Pigeaud2011), makes every one of his visits valuable to those elites and communities who seek political favours from him. His last visit here had been in 1991 at the peak of popular struggles for democratization. The rarity of his presence among the populations of his ‘second home’ (who could be likened to his ‘neighbours’) draws considerable interest and curiosity from local residents, both the ‘ordinary’ people and the elites.

Such curiosity partly explains why many ‘ordinary’ people turned out to welcome him with several cultural dance performances along the way as his motorcade drove into the city from a heliport on the outskirts, newly built for the occasion. At the parade grounds, as at the state dinner that he offered at the regional presidential villa to mark the end of the celebrations, several hundred people struggled to touch him, stretching out their hands, just for the symbolic value of the prestige associated with the act for the less powerful hosts (both the elites and the ‘ordinary’ people). In a country where political communication is still largely mediated by face-to-face encounters (Ngomba Reference Ngomba2011), Bamenda's hosting of the head of state was spectacularized by the private and especially the public media as a demonstration of the conviviality, and by extension the political legitimacy, that exists between President Biya and his citizens.

Covering the event for the state public broadcasting corporation, CRTV, the chief correspondent, Michel Njock Abanda, summarized the encounter in the forceful though symbolic imagery of a popular president whose legitimacy is without question. Very meticulously and in great detail, he reported in the French evening news segment of Le Journal Télévisé de 20h30 of 9 December 2010 how the presidential visit happened ‘as if in a dream’Footnote ⁴ for the people of the North-West Region. For him, ‘the spectacular display of patriotic fervour in this communion between Paul Biya and the sons and daughters of the North-West Region is representative of that which exists between Paul Biya and the populations in the other nine regions of the country’ (CRTV 2010b).

Biya's visit to one of the ‘regions’ was also meant to show Cameroonians that the absentee head of state was very much present and within their reach, listening to them when he ‘communes with the nation’. For the national daily, Cameroon Tribune, this conviviality was glaring because ‘face-to-face with the population of the North-West … it was all about a president who listens to the concerns of his compatriots, as President Biya was back to his second home’ (Cameroon Tribune 2010). Citing the presidential protocol service as a source, this press report reveals further that ‘Content de l'accueil qui lui a été réservé, le président de la République a décidé de passer une seconde nuit à Bamenda’, as a show of appreciation for ‘the warmth’ in the communion between the host and the guest (ibid.).

Without doubt, there is a large element of the usual government propaganda to all this constructed imagery of conviviality by the government's media. It is evident that this was mainly a ‘political setting’ or ‘symbolic form’ (Cohen Reference Cohen1981: 32, 218–19; Edelman Reference Edelman1964) through which the patrimonial relations of power between Biya and his supporters were publicly dramatized in a style of proximity and intimacy. Nonetheless, such proximity is belied by Biya's heavy personal guard, which makes really approaching and talking to him unthinkable for elites and ‘ordinary’ people alike. Upon his return to the capital city Yaoundé, the president allegedly performed a last act by personally writing to the people of the North-West Region, congratulating them for their ‘total mobilization’ during the event as well as ‘thanking the elite of the North-West Region’ (The Star 2010: 5).

As Cohen (Reference Cohen1981) and Geertz (Reference Geertz1981) have shown, theatricality in state spectacles is a key element in state-making and legitimation. Thus, however theatrical the staged act of conviviality or political intimacy was between Biya and his supporters within the CPDM in Bamenda, it unquestionably yielded some political value for Biya's desire to spectacularize his legitimacy nationally, especially his ability to deliver development to those who support him.

BETWEEN BUEA AND BAMENDA: HOSTING AS A CULTURAL SPACE OF PATRIMONIAL INTIMACY

Since the return to multiparty politics in Cameroon, a pattern seems to have emerged that links the hosting of the head of state to the successful acquisition of much-sought-after resources for development by local regional communities. On his campaign visit to the Far-North Region during the 2004 presidential election cycle, as the elites there demanded, even threatened, to secede if they were not given a university, Biya promised to create one. To their great joy, he did so in 2008. This does not mean that hosting as a cultural space of political intimacy necessarily leads to success in obtaining the desired gifts of development. In December 2011, right after the October presidential elections, when President Biya visited the town of Ebolowa in his native South Region for the pompously celebrated agro-pastoral show, the chiefs of that region gave him a memorandum in which they requested a university for the South. He did not grant their wish instantly nor has he done so yet. Similarly, on 5 August 2012 on the occasion of the head of state's visit to Bertoua, the capital of the East Region, to launch the construction project for the much heralded Lom Pangar dam, the elite there (especially the chiefs) presented a memorandum in which they too requested a university for their region. But, as in Ebolowa, he did not grant their wish. In both cases, however, he may yet do so. It appears that Biya is more likely to be responsive to demands made during state visits when elections, especially presidential polls, are on the horizon.

For the ‘hosting’ elite, however, the main point about hosting as a cultural space of political intimacy between the head of state and his supporters is not that the gifts desired should be granted immediately; rather, it is that it offers an opportunity to make the request in a manner that seems more obliging considering the atmosphere of intimacy and festivity that prevails. Even in the case of the hosting in Bamenda, the question may well be raised that these ‘gifts’ of development offered instantly in the North-West might have been negotiated prior to the ceremony, behind the scenes, and over several months or years. Even if this was the case, this supports my view of hosting as a ‘setting’ designed to spectacularize the elites' efforts to demand development for their local communities and Biya's ability to deliver it, sometimes instantly, contributing to the purchase of greater legitimacy for his regime.

Yet the space of proximity with the powerful head of state provided by an opportunity to host high-level state ceremonies also bears its antinomies. As in all forms of proximities and intimacies, there is always, potentially, the possibility that misunderstandings between the host and guest could arise or that the hierarchical power relations between the two are not masked properly, creating tensions and even conflicts. As the ‘Fon of Fons’, President Biya, like all Fons, is also the ambivalent figure of the ‘good devil’ (Warnier Reference Warnier2007). He can be generous and necessary to the development of the communities that host him, yet retain the capacity to be whimsical and ruthless, destroying them through maiming and torture, or simply distorting the everyday rhythm of the lives of his subjects. In the event of his visit to Bamenda – which, we must recall, was intended for the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Cameroon's independent armed forces – months before his arrival several battalions of various brigades were dispatched to Bamenda, to the horror and panic of the city's population (New Cameroon 2010; The Herald Tribune 2010c). Notwithstanding this potential danger of militarized brutality on the part of Biya's security forces on the local ‘hosting’ population of Bamenda, the hosting of the head of state in the city largely indicates a successful and productive construction of a space of political intimacy between Biya and his supporting elites within the CPDM party in the North-West Region.

But the process of its actual construction – that is, how the elites negotiated with the head of state to have Bamenda chosen as host for the fiftieth anniversary of Cameroon's armed forces – was somewhat shrouded in secrecy. In stark contrast, the political effort to host Biya by the South-West political elites has been quite public and transparent, through such events as the ‘meet the press’ event and the mega-forum, even to the point of exposing deep cracks and struggles among the elites themselves. As I recount above, when the political posturing among South-West political elites appeared to go against what Mayor Moki had anticipated, he turned to the press to expose what he saw as lacklustre leadership by the ‘old guard’ of South-West elites. This intra-South-West political posturing for hosting these celebrations dragged on for several months, even though the patron-in-chief, Paul Biya, had not made any official declarations on the matter. He prolonged even further the suspense over whether the event would be commemorated or not and seemed unconcerned by the uncertainty that his delay in declaring the host town or city was causing.

Due to this uncertainty, on 20 July 2011, the Buea Traditional Council (chiefs in the Buea subdivision) held a meeting on the matter. They subsequently dispatched a memorandum signed by the paramount chief of the Bakweri people of Buea to President Paul Biya, through the office of the governor of the South-West Region, urging him to formally declare Buea as the host of these commemorations (The Cameroon Buzz 2011). Ndiva Kofele-Kale, a Bakweri native of Buea, who is a professor of law at the Southern Methodist University in the United States and a member of this Buea Traditional Council (as legal adviser), was asked about the content of this message from the council to Biya. He simply supported the mayor's position: ‘Buea has one of the best cases for why the main event marking that historical moment [the reunification] has to be in Buea’, and, with regard to the benefits, ‘we would be saying the same thing as the Mayor of Buea has been saying; infrastructure, water supply, light, land for our growing population’ (ibid.).

All of these efforts seemed to help to finally get President Biya to end the suspense. On 31 December 2011 he declared Buea as the host for the commemorative ceremony for the country's fifty years of reunification. With this uncertainty over the host city settled, this immediately brought the elites of the South-West Region together, setting them in motion on preparations to host the head of state. As I returned to Buea in September 2012, I observed some of these preparations. Mayor Moki worked to have the town adopt as its new motto the following phrase: ‘Buea, the Town of Legendary Hospitality’. He also worked assiduously to see that this motto adorns most of the main places in the town, such as the Mile 17 Motor Park, which is right at the entrance to the town, as well as Bongo Square. The regional presidential quarters in Buea, which had been in a very poor state of neglect for years, were suddenly the object of serious refurbishing efforts by the region's authorities.

Even more than in Bamenda, the authorities of the region, under the leadership of the governor of the South-West Region, Bernard Okala Bilai, are now engaged in a vigorous campaign of what they see as ‘urban renewal’. This has been characterized by several demolitions of poorly built houses by the side of the main road running through the town as well as a mandatory requirement that all houses by this main road be painted in ‘bright colours’ (white and yellowish-white). Additionally, the elites have been trying to have a second road refurbished that links the other major nearby town of Limbé to Buea through the Wututu–Sasse axis.

To supplement these material efforts, the regional elites created the South-West Support Committee under the leadership of Peter Mafany Musonge, the former prime minister of Cameroon, who is himself a native of Buea. For nearly two years now this committee has organized several public meetings, mainly with the elites of the South-West, to raise funds to help pay the cost of organizing this forthcoming state ceremony. By April 2012, at the second meeting organized by the committee in the South-West town of Kumba, they disclosed that of the 150 million CFA francs (approximately US$292,000) they had initially earmarked as the contribution of the South-West regional elites to help pay for this event, they had successfully raised 74 million CFA francs (approximately US$145,000) in a combination of cheques and pledges (see L'Action 2012). Surprisingly, by the last meeting of the committee on 4 May 2013, they revealed that they had successfully raised 200 million CFA francs, surpassing the initial estimates by 50 million CFA francs (Cameroon Tribune 2013). They claimed that, in addition to the funds provided by the state, their committee's additional ‘money would be used to feed the well over 20,000 people expected from the different divisions of the region and elsewhere as well as lodge guests, amongst other activities’ (ibid.).

Also revealing is the high cost already associated with this event, even before the event itself has been held; this cost is far more than Mayor Moki had initially imagined in terms of the financial benefits that the hosting could bring to Buea. On 8 June 2013, the South-West Governor, Bernard Okalia Bilai, who is the head of the local organizing committee for the event, claimed that about 20 billion CFA francs (approximately US$39.115 million) have already been spent on projects associated with preparations for the reunification celebrations in Buea (The Post 2013). Among the projects reportedly realized or under construction using these funds they cited the construction of roads into the municipality; a road under construction to link the governor's office and the town; rooms in the Mountain Hotel and Parliamentarian Flats; a 1,300-seat presidential grandstand; a befitting City Hall for Buea; a facelift of the governor's office; and the tarring of some roads in Buea (ibid.). According to Okalia Bilai, the lavish expenses associated with these preparatory projects for the celebrations of the reunification in Buea are ‘a testimony that President Biya wants the occasion to be solemn’ (ibid.).

Given the reputation of Cameroon as a safe haven for elite corruption, especially through the common practice of over-invoicing in public infrastructure projects (see Orock and Mbuagbo Reference Orock and Mbuagbo2012), one must view the 20 billion CFA francs tab critically; a lot of this money might not have actually gone into payments for those projects. Nevertheless, as Mayor Moki had anticipated, the overall point to be made with regard to my argument about hosting as a cultural space for engaging in patrimonial politics is that Buea has already begun to receive the windfall of redistributive politics associated with the political opportunity connected to hosting President Biya, even before the event itself has been held. It is also true that the actual organization of the reunification celebrations keeps being prolonged and might indicate a failure on the part of the South-West political elites to get Biya to Buea. However, the point to be taken with regard to the hosting of the head of state as a political practice in legitimation is that Biya is probably waiting to stage the event at a later date. This could be either closer to the municipal or legislative elections or at some other moment when it will serve his political interests the most to display his ability to give ‘gifts’ of development to the electorate.