Clearly, the glowing remarks made by Nourane Foster (real name Nourane Moluh Hassana) about the First Lady, Chantal Biya, are not going down well within her political family, the Cameroonian Party for National Reconciliation (CPNR ).
The MP, elected in February 2020 in the Wouri-Est constituency in Douala, presented the wife of President Paul Biya as “an exceptional person who is full of positive energy”. Enough to puzzle her party comrades. Since her publication on her Facebook page, Nourane Foster has become a prime target on social media. An activist from her political family even compared her to a two-headed snake, an allusion to her Bamoun ancestry, before rushing to apologize to the elected representative.
Some CPNR executives, who have refrained from participating in this stoning on social media, nevertheless confide that this slip-up by the elected official will interest the party’s Ethics and Monitoring Committee (EMC). Officially, Nourane Foster is not yet the subject of disciplinary proceedings. To get there, the EMC must first formally take up the case. If the report of this body sufficiently incriminates the MP, the matter will then be brought to the attention of the Disciplinary Commission. It was this commission that ruled in March 2024 on the exclusion of Robert Kona, the former president of the CPNR who contests Cabral Libii’s leadership. It remains to be seen whether Nourane Foster will suffer the same fate.
Nothing suggests so in any case, even if the virulence of the reactions of certain executives of this opposition party suggests that Nourane Foster is in big danger. One of the very first to react was Cabral Libii. The CPNR president posted a laconic message on his Facebook page to comment on his comrade’s remarks: “it’s hard to do better… or worse”.
Following him, William Bayiha admits that he felt betrayed when he discovered this photo showing Nourane Foster posing proudly alongside Chantal Biya during the New Year’s greetings ceremony for the first lady. This former Africanews journalist, presented as a close advisor to Cabral Libii, offers a personal analysis of this affair, which continues to hit the headlines. “Our astonishment aims to understand how an elected official of this level, knowing the ideological and political distance that separates us from this regime whose common denominator is enjoyment, can find words to salute the person of Mrs. Chantal Biya, whose lifestyle and habits contrast with the CPNR’s social project”, he wonders.
National Assembly
Beyond this reproach, the CPNR nomenklatura fears above all that the flattering remarks of Nourane Foster will revive the old controversy over the proximity between Cabral Libii and the power of Yaoundé, nine months before the next presidential election. It is obvious that Cabral Libii is uncomfortable every time he is presented as a supporter of the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), the party in power. It is for this reason that the CPNR has worked in recent years to build distance with the power of Paul Biya.
It is more in the National Assembly, where the party has five deputies with Cabral Libii as leader, that this distance has been most publicized. The CPNR elected officials have never missed the opportunity to take the government on the wrong foot. This is the case of Nourane Foster herself, who, we remember, spoke in the Chamber to ask the government to involve the populations in the reconstruction plan for the North-West and South-West regions in crisis.
The CPNR has never hesitated to amend a bill that arrived on the table of the parliamentarians, the finance law in particular. The elected representatives of this party even went so far as to block a plenary session to complain about the late arrival of the finance bill in Parliament. So many actions supposed to end the controversy over the proximity between the CPNR and the government in this election year. A confidence tainted since Nourane Foster’s statement. This is why William Bayiha denounces for this a “problematic communication in the Cameroonian political context in an election year”.
Officially, the CPNR has not communicated its official position on this affair. Officials from the party’s general secretariat have been content to compare it to a “miscellaneous fact”. In short, the CPNR has chosen to focus on the presidential election. Cabral Libii, who finished third in 2018 behind Paul Biya and Maurice Kamto, is once again a candidate. He has already put together the team that will lead his campaign when the time comes. And since the beginning of the year, he has been working to encourage young people to register on the electoral lists.
Cabral Libii has never hidden his ambition to lead Cameroon. His teams repeat to anyone who will listen that the time has come to send Paul Biya into retirement. To achieve this, their candidate will need support as in 2018. According to many confidences, Nourane Foster has gained rank in this opposition party because she actively participated in Cabral Libii’s campaign in Douala during the last presidential election. Is she still part of the equation this year? We will probably have to wait and see to find out.
SBBC